English Posts – Seite 8 – Sebastian Müllers Blog

NYRIS 11 Presentation

And here is the abstract and the slides to my presentation. I gave it at Mon 13 of June at NYRIS 11 in Turku in the stream 1 „active youth participation“

Youth councils in the German State of Baden-Württemberg (BW) and Finland

By: Sebastian Müller (University of Education Freiburg) June 14, 2011

Keywords: youth political attitudes, political participation, political behavior, democracy

What was the study about?

In both Finland and the German state of Baden-Württemberg, there are youth councils. Youth council was defined for the study as: “Elected bodies composed of people between the ages of 12 and 22, that are instituted by the local authority and deal with public policy.”

In recent years, the amount of youth councils has increased in both areas to more than 80 in BW and more than 90 in Finland. In BW, the spread of youth councils began around the mid 1990s, in Finland it began around the turn of the century. Both umbrella organizations have a working relationship since 2006, delegations visit each other annually and they participate in joint action.

There are very few scientific enquiries dealing specifically with youth councils, and up to now there was none dealing with them in both areas.

In both regions I sent out two kinds of questionnaires: one dealing with the structures and the other with attitudes of youth councilors. This questionnaire was based on the work done by Michael C. Hermann, who investigated youth councils in BW in 1995.

„NYRIS 11 Presentation“ weiterlesen

Classroom Research Class at the PH with Dr. Heather Lotherington

In the last couple of weeks I attend a very intensive class at the PH. Usually our classes are via one term and only two hours per week. This class is only four weeks but 8 hours each week, so we are together a lot. Its only my second class in which we are on first name base with the lecturer, the other one was with Tonio Oeftering when he had just started his PhD Program and we intensivly read texts about Hannah Arendt, one of the most intresting polictics Seminars I did ever.

sp-studio(14) — The lecturer from York University / Picture created with the help of: www.sp-studio.de.

But back to our Class about Classroom Research. I had a seminar in English about it once with another lecturer but it wasn’t that interesting and I don’t remember so much. Heather is really full of power („Energiebündel“) and seems to be very enthusiastic about what she does. I wish we had more lectures like this. Though I wonder if she is very leftist? At least she seems to have a high rateing on the scales for political zynisism.

I wish we had more exchange lectureres it makes studying so much more intresting.

A friend of mine in Bengkulu (Sumatra) is writing his Bsc Thesis on this as well so I hope I might help him a little with this, too. „Classroom Research Class at the PH with Dr. Heather Lotherington“ weiterlesen

from Salo its Nuva ry life

In Finish schools you take off your shoes when entering the building, so we had many visitors and many shoes

On the wekend the delegation from the Dachverband der Jugendgemeinderäte in Baden-Württemberg e.V. went to Salo to see our friends from nuva ry and find some new from Hackney youth council in the UK. Hackney is a borough (my indonesian friends would say: kampung) of London. All three groups gave presentations on their work.

I learned many interesting facts on the youth councils in booth countries from this presentations and I will include what I have learned in my thesis.

„from Salo its Nuva ry life“ weiterlesen

What are the views of Finnish youth councilors?

What do finish youth councillors think? A little glimpse into the views held by Finnish youth councillors is provided by this table on the right you find the item in the Finnish translation of the questions on the left the German original question. „What are the views of Finnish youth councilors?“ weiterlesen

Teaching english with Google n-gramm viewer

There has been some discussion about the recently introduced google ngramm viewer. Some people like it, some linguists see it as to simplistic. However I believe its a good instrument to introduce linguistics and especially corpus analysis into the classroom. I developed together with a fellow student a unit on this in the class of Prof. Thaler. Parts of it will be published in a upcoming book of him. This is an excerpt.

Exploring grammar and cultural trends with Google Ngramm Viewer:

Please go to the following website: http://ngrams.googlelabs .com

Here you can enter two or three English or German expressions and see how their use developed in books over the years. Realistic results you will get only between 1800 – 2000.

What is it about:

This new Google service makes us able to investigate cultural trends over the last 200 years. Development in the world is often reflected in words. For example, if we Ngramm the word DDR, we see it has been mentioned from the 1950 on and peaks in the 1990. This shows insights about fields such as the science of making lexica, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and history of disease.

The decline of “whom”

You can see trends in the use of grammar as well, for example during the year the use of the genitive indicator “whom” declined.

„Teaching english with Google n-gramm viewer“ weiterlesen

Resources for teaching English

That happens if you don’t behave in school!

In our seminar on teaching english we used the following online resources for teaching grammer:

Edufind: http://edufind.com/english/grammar/grammar_topics.php

The Internet Grammer of English, intended for University undergraduates, complete with exercises and a lot of explanations, a British Grammer, from the University College of London: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/frames/contents.htm

Tingo Lingo from the University of Koblenz, a very funny flash and browser based English game for students, its intended for childrend but can be used for adult learners as well: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/tingolingo/

2010 in review

At the beginning of each year its time to take inventory. This is a little silly because a year is more or less an arbitray thing and that we start in January and not at any other date is as arbitrary as well. Never the less I got this review about my blog from wordpress:

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 9,600 times in 2010. That’s about 23 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 137 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 288 posts. There were 195 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 185mb. That’s about 4 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was October 14th with 188 views. The most popular post that day was About / über Sebastian.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, de.wordpress.com, Google Reader, and lawblog.de.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for komasaufen, sebastian müller, untergang der ddr gründe, gründe für den untergang der ddr, and sbamueller@wordpress.com. „2010 in review“ weiterlesen

Reading for Academia

Counting on Google Books – in „the chronicle of higher education“ is about the recently published google N-gramm viewer and its implications on the study of history of the humanities. The N-gramm viewer itself is a fantastic thing and will lend to many hours time spend over the coming Christmas holidays. (see an instant n-gramm of the published interest in Germany about Indonesia) The researchers website can be accessed here. http://www.culturomics.org/

There are two interesting articles on language log on it.

As you see on the weekend I was near and in Munich and we made a wonderful trip to Neuschwanstein castle. More Fotos if you click on it.

„Reading for Academia“ weiterlesen