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! and now Weiter geht’s! began with a sabbatical leave in 1999. It seemed that an entirely different language curriculum was necessary to make any significant impact on the way German was taught. David Antoniuk and I applied successfully for an Ameritech grant and then a FIPSE grant to create Auf geht’s! which was published in 2005.

Working on Auf geht's! and Weiter geht’s! has been a great experience and really feeds into my interests in language acquisition, psycholinguistics, technology 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 very quickly.

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