markusreuter / haferweg 15 / 22769 hamburg
markusreuter
University of Art and Design Helsinki Application Office Hämeentie 135 C 00560 Helsinki Finland
Dear Sir or Madam,
haferweg 15 22769 hamburg +49.177.4353936 roitsch@gmail.com www.markus-reuter.com www.roitsch.info
22 Febraury 2009
I would like to apply for the MA program “ePedagogy Design - Visual Knowledge”. I am presently studying educational science at the University of Hamburg. The focus of my study is the connection of education and creative elements, espacially visualisatitions with the help of different media (technology). During my last years I accomplished different projects, which all have the ability to combine design, interculturality, and education. My personal motive for my application is that the University of Arts and Design Helsinki will provide their students with the MA program “ePedagogy design” exactly these three factors. The international MA program would perfectly provide my career to become an educator, who can combine the three elements design, interculturality, and education. My application, especially my study plan might be very diffrent to other ones you will receive. Within my study plan I want to show you my development chronologically arranged in order to give you the explanation why I became the person I am right now and why I would like to apply for the MA program “ePedagogy Design”. Thank you very much for your consideration.
Sincereley,
Markus Reuter
curiculumvitae born 22 January 1982 in Düsseldorf, Germany adress Haferweg 15 22769 Hamburg mobile +49.177.4353936 email roitsch@gmail.com
markusreuter
education Sept 2006 - Present University of Hamburg Study of Pedagogy Sept 03 – June 05 University of Regensburg Study of Pedagogy, Pre-diploma Sept 92 – June 02 Goethe-Gymnasium Düsseldorf Abitur
experience June 08 - Present
University of Hamburg, Project ePUSH http://mms.uni-hamburg.de/zentrale/projects/view/7 Student employee: Public relations, Visualizations and Evaluation
Sept 08 - Present
University of Hamburg Tutor: for the seminar „ePortfolio“
Oct 07 - Present
Warner Chappell Music GmbH & Co. Kg Germany http://warnerchappell.com Administration and Copyright Management
Nov 05 – April 06
Amnesty International New York, USA http://amnestyusa.org/educate/about/page.do?id=1102103 Volunteer: Projects for the section „Human Rights Education“
Sept 05 – Sept 06
Cultural Care, NewYork City, USA http://culturalcare.com Aupair
May 04 - Sept 04
Internationale Jugendgemeinschaftsdienste, IJGD http://ijgd.de Internship: Planing, Realization, and Evaluation of an international Workcamp
Dec 01 – Jan 03
Martin Leyer-Pritzkow; Curator http://www.mlpart.com/index_engl.htm Student employee: Customer Aquisition, Planing & Realization of exhibitions
May 95 – Sept 03
Catholic Community Service http://dem-leben-dienen.de/ Team leader: Planing, Realization, and Evaluation of different camps
skills Language German (native), English (fluent), French and Spanish (basics) Media Adobe-Products, Office-Products, CSS, HTML, Final Cut
interesttagcloud
interesttagcloud generated with http://wordle.net
myapplication
The first project I would like to present is the idea behind my application. As you may have noticed there are several elements which recur throughout the application. These elements shall create a specific corporate identity. A corporate identity includes different aspects: corporate design, personal identity, and corporate communication. My corporate design is very simple and well structured. The first element is the speech bubble, which occurs on every piece of my application. The speech bubble is a visualisation of communication (of speech), but simultaneously a medium of communication itself - it visualises the content of speech via writing. The beholder reads the writing and thereby a communication process is created. Communication is a basic element of education. Besides the speech bubbles I use the same font and colors to create an effect of recognition. In my letter of motivation you can find two different kinds of (hyper-)links. The first one is a hyperlink in form of the url (e.g. www.markus-reuter.com), which leads to a certain project or topic you should visit to attain more information. The other link, in form of blue underlined expressions refers to a certain part in my application. The design of the second link is inspired by the hyperlinks in the internet. For example letter of motivation (above) or the link googlemaps, which refers to a single project in my portfolio. My personal identity are the three basic elements design, intercultural aspects, and edcuation, which creates the basis for my aimed profession. You will recognize that these three elements matter throughout all my projects but also throughout all the experiences of work I have had (curriculumvitae). The corporate communication is basically the application itself. First is the written sample, second is the website www.markus-reuter.com which I designed for the application to simplify the hyperlinks within this application. The online application is the same as the written one, but embeded into a flash document so you can browse with the ease of visualisation provided by the internet. The basic idea was to present some of my skills through the application itself. I used layout
and text editing (Adobe InDesign) to create the written application. With the help of image editing software (Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator) I embeded the images into the doucments. Using CSS and HTML I was able to design the online application. Skills of visualisation, helped me to commit my ideas/thoughts to paper. My first of all steps was to create a mind map on my wall to visualise the structure and concept of my application. The visualisation was the golden thread throughout my whole process of application.
whyme
whytaik
whyePedagogydesign
Within my study plan I would like to explain my reasons why I am applying for the MA program “ePedagogy Design” at the University of Arts and Design Helsinki. The task is not just solved by simplemindedly listing my reasons, I would like to explain why I have been dealing with the topics of design, interculturality, and education for a long time and why I would like to extend my skills in dealing with these topics through the MA program. Since I can remember I was always confronted with the three topics design, interculturality, and education. It came naturally to me that I became an educator. My grandmother and my mother both were kindergarden teachers. My father is an trainee teacher at the public utility. My grandfather was a carpenter and my whole familiy has the aptitude to be called a “do-it-yourself” family, it means that crafting and creativity is spread throughout my whole family. In my circle of friends most of the people do some kind of creative work. Many of them are working in an advertising agency, or studying arts and design. It always affected me to socialize with people with creative professions. After I finished my school leaving exams, I was not quite sure what to do. During my community service, I had conversations with different people who knew me the best, and they all recommended me to look for a scope of work where I am dealing with people, because as they told me I had the ability to be good with people. I came to the idea to study pedagogy at the University of Regensburg. During my second year at the university I had to make an internship. I decided to lead an international work camp. I was fascinated by the combination of intercultural aspects and edcuation. So I thought about having more experience in that field. I decided to make a break before my prediploma to get some work experience abroad. During my year in New York City I was an au pair for an US-american family. My main job was to care for a 10-year old boy. The experience to live within a different culture was unique. Especially the city itself, New York, had and still has a lasting effect on me. During my time abroad I was able to work for Amnesty International USA. I volunteered for the Human Rights Education program. The combination of education and the creative aura of New York inspired me to decide that I wanted to change the University. I changed to the University of Hamburg after my pre-diploma in order to study pedagogy within the new media. The faculty of pedagogy at the University was very interesting for me. The program ePUSH and the multi media studio are good examples of the usage of new media within education. Through the seminar “Visual Knowledge Culture” of Torsten Meyer I was asked to accomplish my own project. I developed the project “GoogleMaps”. The project is still ongoing, but preliminiary feedback has been exceedingly positive. Torsten Meyer liked the project and asked me to join the faculty’s mayor project ePUSH, where the faculty wants to help shape the ICT-developments for the section education. My first project was “studylog“, where I designed a video for the “knowledge construction tool”. I started to gain more interest in the topic of new media. Last October I started to run a weblog,
“roitsch.info”, where I write on a variety of topics affecting me, such as design, music, or art. And within my choices of lectures and seminars I centred upon education and new media. For the seminar “Change of Media - Change of Education” I was participating in the work of creating a wiki about the seminars topic. I joined a group with students of the MA program “ePedagogy Design”, Joni and Noora. We handled the topic „Central Perspective, book print and beyond“. My own part dealed with the topic “Google and the Central Perspective”. In the following semester I got the assignment to develop posters to make ePUSH and its subprojects more public. The ePUSH posters were hung up throughout the entire faculty. Another project was to develop a visualisation of a survey about the students media use. I am currently designing the surveys visualisation with the help of Ole Koch. Recently I designed a video for the seminar “Pedagogical Media Theory”. The video “finding answers” is about the development of media which are used to find aswers to certain questions. As you can see my progression of studying pedagogy in order to become an educator who can combine the three elements design, interculturality, and education was influenced by many things throughout many years. I enjoyed every single project and would like to go on with my progression by attending the MA program “ePedagogy Design - Visual Knowledge” at the University of Arts and Design Helsinki. The MA program is the perfect combination of my three basic fields of interest. The international program is offered to students from all over the world and I would like to make use of the interculturality in order to collect different point of views and different options to deal with educational problems. The focus on technology and especially new media is a perfect combination to the scientific work of education. In my opionion using technology in education has some great advantages but also bears a lots of challenges. I would like to join the MA program to learn more about the topic and gain skills to cope with these challenges. Within my application you can recognise my personal skills and strenghts. I feel that my streghts lie with thinking creatively, constructively solving problems and using visualization to generate the greatest amount of impact. Further, I feel that I am a strong motivated team worker. The ongoing project surveys visualisation allows me to apply these skills. The project was very well received by our superiors. My future plan is to merge design and interculturality into education. In March 2009 I will start an internship at “mpg Experience Design”. Their scope of work contains developing interactive exhibitions for musems or science centers. I conceive to work in such a scope of work, it would perfectly combine my personal interests with my profession. The MA program “ePedagogy Design” would help me to extend my skills and would accompany me to make my future plan come true.
internationalworkcamp
In summer 2004 I fulfilled my required internship for my pre-diploma. I was in charge of an international work camp, where 11 international youths were asked to reconstruct a playground in Berlin. My internship included the preparation of the camp, the realisation of the work we were assigned to do, the evaluation of the program and a presentation of the results at a meeting with the joint service, IJGD. The preparation began with a training program where I learned a theoretical basis and some practical tutorials about variant topics as civic education, self-organisation, intercultural or social learning. I also learned about the legal points of an international work camp and its organisational processing. Two weeks before the actual work camp the organisational and educational preperation had begun. During the camp in Berlin I needed to handle the realisation, the supervision of the international youth group as well as the management of the budget for the whole group. The youth group consisted of 11 different people from around the world. Our work assignment was to reconstruct an adventure playground. The adventure playground was based in an underdeveloped neighbourhood of Berlin. Mostly children came to the playground in order to distract themselves from their situations at home. The result was that the whole group had an additional work to accomplish, we needed to care for the children as well. It was very interesting to see how the whole group was interacting differently with problems resulted from varieties of the cultural background. Most of the children were not able to speak English and most of the work camp participants didn‘t speak German. But the atmosphere was very good and we fulfilled our assignment more than satisfying. The work camp was my first experience with an assignment I needed to fulfil with a group of people with different cultural backgrounds. We needed to construct something with the help of different skills and needed to handle the situation that we all have different cultural relations to most of the things we dealed with. This experience inspired me to work in an intercultural context of edcuation and I was sure I wanted to create things which can be received by people.
newyork
humanrightseducation
During my year abroad in New York City from September 2005 till September 2006, I was an au pair for an US-american Family. During that year I had the most impressive experiences and inspirations I could have ever imagined. In just a few other cities of the world the cultural impact is as omnipresent as in New York City. But not only the cultural variety was a big impression, also the ubiquitous creativity throughout the city had a big impact on me. I was sure that when I go back to Germany I would try to integrate these two elements much more within my study. I wanted to use creativity to provide education. I wanted to have contact to different cultures to use the impressions to extend my options of education methods. At that time I was sure to change my university to fulfil these ideas. After a few months I was given the opportunity to use my spare time for a traineeship at Amnesty International USA. In the time between November 2005 and April 2006 I worked for the Human Rights Education program. My responsibilities were conducting research and assisting on administrative matters. My assignment was to collect information about the USamerican education system. Amnesty International and Joy Berry, a famous American author of children self-help books, published a book about the Human Rights for kids, “Mine & Yours“. Amnesty International had the purpose to constitute the book as a schoolbook for elementary schools throughout the USA. For the integration of the book into the everyday school life it was necessary to know within which subjects the Human Rights can be taught. I was asked to find out which subjects were taught throughout one state and who was responsible for the curriculums in this state. I made a research on the organization of the state’s education system for the 50 states of America and made contact to the responsible policy makers. The involvement in the work of the Human Rights Education program was a great experience for me. I learned a lot about the US-american education system, and the way how a creative and usefull product needs to make its way through officialdom to get utilised.
googlemaps
The seminar “Visual Knowledge Culture” was offered by Torsten Meyer for the summer semester 2008. I visited the seminar enthusiastically because this was one of the first seminars for me, where we students were allowed to find our own field of attention and were asked to develop our own project which has connections to the seminar‘s topic. I was always interested into “Google” and all their products. One session dealed with visual representations of our world, “Cartography”. At first I came up with the idea to embed our faculty into the “GoogleMaps” system. The background was to support the student‘s spatial orientation throughout the campus. At the beginning of someones study the student needs to find his way throughout the campus, for example he needs to find a special building or needs to know where he can apply for a scholarship. The idea was realised pretty fast. More and more ideas came into my mind. I thought about the connection of the virtual world with the reality. The idea was to embed a “GoogleMaps” marker into real life. A marker made of sturdy material should be mounted in front of the faculty‘s main building inorder to arouse the students attention. It is the same spot as the spot of the digital marker in “GoogleMaps” and it looks the same, so the effect of recognition is guaranteed. The project started fictional but the idea gained more and more interest so that the project became one project of the faculty‘s mayor project ePUSH. After I convinced executives of our faculty, who had to decide whether to support the project or not, the project developed to the idea to embed all buildings of our faculty into the “GoogleMaps” network and to embed “GoogleMaps” marker infront of every main buidling. Right now, the status of realisation is processing. Torsten Meyer had the idea to incorporate the College of Fine Arts of Hamburg. It has to be considered that the markers need to be mounted very carefully inorder to protect them against vandalism. A second idea was that theoretically the satellites of “Google” will scan the world one day and the “real life” marker is scanned by a satellite and will be published by “GoogleMaps”. Then the representation of the virtual world in the real world will be represented in the virtual world again. The project is an attempt to create a cut through the real world by the virtual world and backwards.
study.log
“study.log” is a knowledge construction tool, which was developed by employees of the educational science faculty of the University of Hamburg. “study.log“ is now also a part of the mayor project ePUSH. Sebastian Plönges and I were asked to support the project by taking over the public relations and become the interface between users and developers. The work included the servicing of the corresponding web site “www.studylog.de”. Our first task was to create a new video which explains the basic ideas and the object of “study.log”. We taped different kinds of media which are usually used to collect material, information or knowledge. Then we presented the advantages of “study. log” by making screen recordings of the tool in action. The realisation of the video exacted a big amount of organisational talent. We needed a female narrator, an expert for voice recording, and someone to compose a musical work for the background. The video can be seen at www.vimeo.com/3295835 In January 2009 the first German “BarCamp” with the topic “Design” took place in Cologne. And I went to the “DesignCamp” in order hold a session about the design aspects of “study.log”. I focused on the visualisation aspects of presenting the material in different kinds of arrangements. The presentation was followed by a discussion about the content of the session. The session was taped by the organiser and streamed online. In this way the publicity effect of the session was very big.
roitsch.info
A weblog is an easy to handle (new) medium for the publisher as well as the for the readers to present aspects of a life and opinions to specific topics. In my opinion a weblog is a mixture of a diary and a medium of communication. My weblog www.roitsch.info started October 2008. I want to collect and share interesting things I met through the internet but also through my everyday life. Basically I am writing about anything which matters to me. The categories are and will not be limited. In my blog I post about topics like design, visualisations, observations of daily life, ideas or music. These topics all have the same effect, they influence me in the way I see things, they represent my interests. Thus you can say my web blog is a reduced presentation of myself. I want to share my impressions with the world in order to communicate about these topics. The strengt h of weblogs is the cultural and social exchange. People read my posts, write comments or create links to my blog/posts. The interexchange through communication creates new points of views. These new points of views can lead to new states of mind and create ideas. According to my opinion ideas are the results of inspiration and creativity. These two elements are essential, also within the scope of education. Thus the weblog influences me in the way I deal with the topic education. A weblog can be reached by everybody in the whole world, consequently there are no cultural Map of visitors of my weblog
or intellectual borders. Another strength of the weblog is that within this
medium you can embed different kinds of media, e.g. texts, videos, music, or flash animations. Thus a personal benefit is that I can use my weblog to publish different projects I accomplished. I can connect them and present them to people, who are giving me feedback. The feedback helps me to find ways of improvement. I learn with the help of people from all over the world, with different cultural backgrounds. My weblog is a perfect instrument to combine the three essential elements I want to work with: design/creativity, interculturality, and education.
google&centralperspective
In the summer semester 2008 I attended the seminar “Change of media - Change of educational settings”, which was open to students from the international master program “ePedagogy Design – Visual Knowledge Building” as well as to students of educational science from the University of Hamburg. In this seminar we dealed with different literature which have a focus on media theory. I joined a group with students from Finland, Joni and Noora. We handled the topic “Central Perspective, book print and beyond”. It was my first seminar where I worked together in a group with people I never met for real. We had conversations through emails and “Skype”. It was a very interesting experience for me. The assignment was to create a wiki about our topic. We subdivided the assignment into different parts and each of us three developed his/her own part but with consideration of the others. I dealed with the supposition that it is often taken for granted that “Google” is getting a monopoly of knowledge. And with its project to digitalise books, “Google” will continue to prove the supposition. In the first part of the wiki I explained the process of digitalisation and reported about the controversies, which occurred recently. The second part deals with the consequences of the overload of information, offered by the internet, espacially offered by “Google”. I reported about the changes which developed with the spreading of the medium internet and the rise of “Google” to the most used search engine world-wide. Espacially educators have to deal with the impacts of these changes. Within my part of the wiki, I discuss the advantages and disadvantages, which come along with these changes. You can find the wiki under this url: http://wiki.christinaferner.de/doku.php?id=content:central_perspective_book_print:00_overview In order to read it, please use the login and password from the written application.
epushposters
One of my first assignments at the mayor project ePUSH was to develop an advertising campaign to make ePUSH and its sub-projects more public throughout our faculty. Sebastian Plönges, Carolin Seng and I were instructed to handle this assignment. The idea was to hang up posters with pictures with unique closeups of our faculty. The posters were labled with quotes from texts with their focus on media theoretical topics. On the one hand we wanted to visualise the connection to the faculty by showing pictures of it and on the other hand we needed to embed the topic we are dealing with in the ePUSH project. For example we used quotes from the “Horizon Report”, which is a qualitative research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations. We wanted to use the advantages of “guerilla marketing” which use uncommon actions to extend a products publicity. One of our idea was to make different steps of promotion. The first step included to hang up posters throughout the whole faculty but with no references of where the posters are coming from. Even in the second step we did not publish on the posters who was responsible for the campaign. We wanted to arouse the students attention by showing them the information on the posters but the missing initiator should arouse even more curiosity. The posters of the third step included references to the ePUSH project. At the best students would then realize the connection of ePUSH, the faculty, and technologies (espacially new media), which are used within learning enviroments.
surveyvisualisation
For the mayor project ePUSH we employees were asked to develop a visualisation for this years survey about the students media use. Ole Koch and me chose to deal with the assignment. At first we thought about the main aspects of the survey. In the main focus were the students and their contact to „new medias“. For example their usage of weblogs, online coummunities, or their contact to medias within their study. But also technical questions were important, for example what kind of operating system their are using or what kind of internet connection. The first work step was to chose the right kind of medium to present the results. That wasn‘t easy because the survey contains more than 30 questions. We choose a flash animation which should be embedded into the faculty‘s web page to provide a big level of flexibility and to get the student‘s attention. We had the idea that the beholder should be animated to interact with the visualisation. The main content of the evaluation is the student himself but we also wanted to show the connection to the university. In order to combine students, the university and the results of the survey, we chose an image of the university with the faculty‘s main buildings from the bird‘s eye perspective. This image is the background of our visualisation. We wanted animated students to run around the campus and they should present the results themselves. The students run around in different colors for different kind of questions. For the realisation we taped our movements from above with a video camera. Then we embedded these movements as an animation into the animated campus. The result was that the students are running around the campus and when you scroll over one certain student with your cursor the animated student holds up a sign with its certain question. When you click onto the sign or the student, the sign turns around and shows the results. The results should not only represent this years evaluation, but also the change to last years results. We came up with a new form of pie chart. The percentage of an answer (e.g. 87% of students are using an internet flat rate) was represented by the circle‘s area. We used the advantages of flash animations and brought the circle to widen. The widening shows the increase or decrease in comparison to last years results. The evaluation was not completed yet, as well as the animation. The base frame works and the single animations as well but right now we need to combine all aspects into one flash animation. As soon as the results are evaluated the flash animation of this years survey will be finished.
findinganswers
For the seminar “Pedagogical Media Theory” in the winter semester 2008 I had to make a multi media snippet, for example a video. The task was to produce a small multi media snippet explaining a concept or a term related to a discussed media theory. With the help of a camera, a screen recording program, Final Cut, and some crafting skills I designed a video, which deals on the one hand with the topic how answers to certain questions can be found. “Google” is currently the most used tool (or interface) for this task, thus it plays a main role in my video. On the other hand the video deals with my professor Torsten Meyer’s thesis that a medium is not only seen by its observer, but that the observer is also seen by the medium. Torsten Meyer uses Jaques Lacan’s “object petit a” to explain an interface in his lecture “Pedagogical Media Theory: Interfaces, Media, Education”. “According to Lacan - in the intersection, between subject and object (whose places are not clarified) originates a screen, an interface [inter-face], between their faces.”1 While I read Torsten Meyer’s interpretation of Lacan afterwards I came to the idea to use this assumption for my video. “Google” is often critized for their observing methods. I used these assumptions to show how the search engine chooses the results for you, in an ironical way. You can see the way the results are found as an assumption of a media theory itself. The medium, e.g. the internet, could be seen as a space of possibilities. Within my video the man in the “Google’s” box office could be seen as the mechanism, which chooses the possibilities and presents the results as search results on your screen, on the interface. I wanted to show how far search engines, especially “Google”, can/might go and I wanted to show that the medium internet misleads the users to believe that it is always up to date, and always shows the truth. That’s why the internet is often the first choice to purchase information. A common task in school is to find information about a certain topic and many pupils (as teachers) believe, by “googling” some things and printing the results the task is settled. But the real work just begins: the information needs to be verified and you need to check the reliability. That’s complicated and hardly taught, mostly because adults even teachers are overchallenged themselves. The video can be seen at www.vimeo.com/3058505
1. Original quote: “In der Mitte, zwischen Subjekt und Objekt (deren plätze nicht geklärt sind) entsteht – Lacan zufolge – somit ein »Bild-schirm«, eine Schnittstelle, ein Inter-face, zwischen den Gesichtern.” Meyer, Torsten: Interfaces, Medien, Bildung. Paradigmen einer pädagogischen Medientheorie, 2002, S.163