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Due to the important role of orthography in society, the project called IDeRBlog presented in this paper created a web-based tool to motivate pupils to write text as well as to read and to comment on texts written by fellow students. In addition, IDeRBlog aims to improve student’s German orthography skills and supports teachers and parents with training materials for their students. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

With the aid of learning analytics, the submitted text is analyzed and special feedback is given to the students so that they can try to correct the misspelled words themselves. The teachers as well as the parents are benefiting from the analysis and exercises suggested by the system.

A recent study showed the efficiency of the system in form of an improvement of the students’ orthographic skills. Over a period of four months 70 percent of the students achieved a significant reduction of their spelling mistakes.

IDeRBlog is an innovative approach to improving orthography skills combining blogging and new media with writing and practice.

Spotlights India and that by 2045 it may become a more populous country than China. Deplores the lack of social and economic development in India and looks at the reasons for these. Tries to explain why the population has shot up from 1971 and two‐thirds of the growth in India has taken place since then. Uses tables to aid in explanation of birth rates, literacy and literacy among females particularly. Concludes that the economic development and urbanization is to be commended but not the only key factor regarding fertility rates of single states.

Ageing of population means for society facing new challenges and one of the main challenges is how to ensure quality of life of elderly and prevent their exclusion from the society. This position of elderly is intrinsically linked to the welfare system and policies that are applied to prevent and tackle social exclusion of vulnerable individuals and groups. The focus is on Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, which are in research often piled in the same group. However, in the article the authors wish to also focus on differences between them.

Social exclusion as a concept for observing vulnerability of elderly enables observation of vulnerabilities in various areas/dimensions at the same time, and also enables comparison of particular populations with other groups and enables determining their position within the society. In this article the authors observe social exclusion of the elderly in several areas: health and access to health care, poverty and material deprivation, housing and local environment and interpersonal relations. Comparative analysis of CEE countries is based on data from European quality of life survey (2007).

The analysis has showed that elderly in CEE are significantly more excluded than the rest of the population, and the most problematic areas were material deprivation, health and interpersonal exclusion. Furthermore, the exclusion of the elderly in CEE is significantly higher than in other European countries, further characterized by a much higher difference in the level of the exclusion of the elderly than the population in general, as compared to the other European countries. This indicates that the so-called post-socialist welfare states do not promote inclusion of the elderly to a satisfactory degree.

Due to a lack of comparative analyses of social policy issues in CEE countries the originality and value of the article is a comparative analysis of social exclusion of the elderly in the CEE countries in comparison to the development of welfare systems in these countries.

This paper aims to examine how population heterogeneity contributes to poverty in 17 high-income Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries during 1980-2005.

The operational strategy involves linking poverty with heterogeneity directly as well as indirectly through welfare state policies as a latent variable in a structural equation framework.

Findings support the widely held poverty-reducing roles of welfare state policies. Ethno-racial and religious diversities are found to positively contribute to welfare state policies and, through them, lower poverty, whereas immigration assumes opposite roles.

Data limitations on population and especially ethno-racial and religious heterogeneity caution against definitiveness.

The findings are useful in understanding the heterogeneity connection of welfare state policies and poverty.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a “new orthodoxy” in explaining homelessness had emerged in the field of homeless research. Combining structural and individual factors, the consensus is that people with personal problems are more vulnerable than others to the structural conditions of becoming homeless.

Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study of older homeless people (aged 50 years and above) in Singapore, this chapter highlights three issues with this new orthodoxy. The first is the continued reliance on a strict dichotomy of structural and individual factors. This strict dichotomy does not reflect the realities in people’s lives. The “individual vulnerabilities” of older people in the study had structural dimensions that must be considered as well. The second is the framing of individual vulnerabilities as individual pathologies. This way of framing homelessness results in the assumption that there is something deficient with all people who are homeless that requires correction. Such a view is encapsulated in the compulsory institutionalisation and rehabilitation of rough sleepers in Singapore. The final and most fundamental issue is the problematic association of individual vulnerabilities with one’s heightened risk of becoming homeless. Older people in the study did not become homeless solely because they had more personal problems or issues than others. Rather, multiple pathways (or life events) that encompass both structural and individual factors weakened their ability to draw resources from work, family and friends and government assistance. Homelessness occurred when older people in the study ran out of all these three options.

This paper takes an ideal type of different welfare regimes as a starting point. It investigates with survey data people's experiences and expectations towards the welfare state and its functioning against various social risks. The paper discusses questions like, are there differences in perceptions between welfare regimes? And what is the role of the welfare state regime in explaining those differences?

This research article is based on OECD survey data and classical welfare state classifications. The analysis of welfare regimes provides both a theoretical and methodological structure for study. The study-applied analysis of variance (one-way ANOVA) to test a hypothesis that regimes matter analyses more nuanced aspects of current and prospects to the near future welfare state provision.

This examination suggests that welfare regimes still matter even though the differences in averages were not as immense as expected. Perceptions in different welfare regimes also have priorities related to the willingness to pay more taxes in order to receive better access to services and financial support if needed. In Nordic countries, the acute priority based on survey data is investment in education and re-training. In Continental Europe, more financial support is needed for pensions. Overall, respondents representing emerging Eastern European and Mediterranean welfare regimes think that welfare provision should be financed more compared to other welfare regime respondents. Health is a universal and unifying issue, particularly in ageing welfare states, and brings health as a traditional and central question again.

Respondents' perceptions work as people's voice and assessments are used to gain a contemporary understanding of welfare and about welfare state functioning.

Using evidence from Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia and Indonesia, the purpose of this paper is to explore how Islamic welfare regime notion evolves in a South East Asian (SEA) context.

To gain a broad frame of reference in discussing Islamic welfare regimes in SEA, this paper employs a combined political-economic and cultural approach to analyze how Islamic welfare ethics in Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia and Indonesia are developed. The specific criterion used to make a comparative analysis of these countries is an interconnection between four levels of Islamic welfare actors (state, market, community and household/relatives) in providing social welfare.

Malaysia and Indonesia have demonstrated the most balanced form of “Islamic welfare diamond” in the relationship between welfare actors, even as the state-centered welfare initiative continues to be expanded, while Brunei has taken a different route. A monarchical political system underpinned by high economic growth has enabled the state to play a major role in welfare distribution, rather than other welfare actors. For this reason, Malaysia and Indonesia are described as having an “Islamic inclusive welfare regime,” while Brunei is reported to have an “Islamic welfare state regime.”

For the purpose of theoretical advancements, there is no doubt that this paper has proposed an alternative framework to developing an understanding of how the Islamic ethical code is articulated in a wide range of welfare configurations within the “South East Asian context.”