Lee Forester

Co-creator and project director, Lee also works on integrating his research in Computer Assisted Language Learning with interaction design.

How I got involved:

Auf geht's! basically started with a conversation I had with David several years back. I had an upcoming sabbatical semester and wanted to do a project involving computers and language learning. I asked David what I could do with a $10,000 grant in a semester, and his answer was "nothing". And after a lengthy discussion, I agreed. There are plenty of supplemental language learning products out there, but I don't know of any that have had a measurable impact on how languages are currently taught. To have a project with national significance would take a much larger effort and a great deal more funding.

Working on Auf geht's! has been a great experience and really feeds into my interests in language acquisition, psycholinguistics, science & technology (I started my studies as a Physics major at UC Berkeley,) computers and teaching. I'm something of a neo-McLuhanite and have always believed that computers and multimedia should be thought of more as a medium rather than a tool. This project is a chance to apply my research and thinking about learning interactions to a real curriculum. Doing an entire course means that we have the freedom to reshape EVERYTHING, and publishing though a small multimedia company means we're free from the control of a Marketing Department at a textbook company. Naturally there are some downsides to this, but with the 'flattened hierarchy' we can incorporate recent research and ideas relatively quickly.

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