a member of the ScottNet^® system.

Who Are We?

Joseph L. Scott, Ph.D., Shirley C. Scott, M.A., and  Brett L. Scott, Systems Analyst, have built an extensive tutorial for German (Lingua Interaktiva:^™ Deutsch-Deutsch) on this universal platform, employing vast quantities of images, sounds, and text.  Prof. Dr. Guy Stern, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor at Wayne State University, is consultant to the German project.  And Mrs. Patricia Anne Williams advises on modern colloquial German.

Since 1961 the authors have taught German language, German literature, foreign language pedagogy, chemistry, general science, social studies (civics), marketing, and small-business management variously from elementary through graduate school.

By 1965 their classroom teaching experience, making extensive use of audio-visual aids, as well as their language laboratory experience with programmed instruction, had suggested to them the required functional elements of an interactive computer-managed multimedia learning system--at that time still technically infeasible, except for text. (See: The Teaching of German: Problems and Methods, ed. Eberhard Reichmann, Philadelphia 1970, p.307ff.)

When "hypermedia" software for the personal computer appeared twenty years later, Brett Scott of Stupifyme.com quickly enhanced and breathed life into his parents' earlier conception.  Brett's truly amazing internet systems design and programming skills, together with his extensive experience in multimedia applications software, soon produced the stand-alone prototype of this system.  And his Internet incarnation of that prototype is a marvel of fully-integrated online interactivity, currently marketed as MakeMeSmart^™.

Now we are seeking the world's most inspired and inspiring teachers to use our author / instructor's toolkit and efficiently rationalized product development strategies to help us build web-based tutorials for any subject-matter on this platform, including American English, British English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Classical Greek, Latin, Gaelic--and eventually all world languages, dead or alive.

If you are such a teacher and wish to earn income by authoring and maintaining learning materials within our program for instantaneous publication to a world-wide Internet market, please e-mail links to your online résumé.  For access click here to request a unique, reusable system login.

Lingua Interaktiva:^™ Deutsch-Deutsch, a suite of interactive online multimedia tutorial products for German, consists of the following components.

• ScottNet's^® Interactive On-Line Testing™, which can test any subject-matter.

• ScottNet's^® On-Line Talking Pictorial Dictionary:™ German-English / English-German

• ScottNet's^® Grammatische Übersicht™, (a compact German grammar with written and interactive exercises, currently available to Joe Scott's students)

• ScottNet's^® Akustische Phonetik: Deutsch™ (a talking phonetics table)

In preparation are:

• ScottNet's^® Interactive Language Tutorial: Deutsch™, (ca. 250 nine-part lessons with online exercises and quizzes)

• ScottNet's^® Lesestücke: Deutsch™, (hundreds of readings in 27 different literary forms with online exercises and quizzes)

• ScottNet's^® Kultur- und Landeskunde im deutschsprachigen Raum™ (featuring Austria, Germany, and Switzerland)

• ScottNet's^® Fachsprache für Spezialisten™, (for language training in many specialized fields)

Essay:  Beyond Methodology and Pedagogy - Jenseits von Methodik und Didaktik

Interactive media are displacing many types of passive instructional media and hold great promise for teacher and student, alike.  Our system currently provides thousands of learners with the extensive interactive presentation, practice, and correction or confirmation required to individualize instructional courses.  Increasingly, the teacher is becoming tutor, facilitator, and conversation partner, a role smart teachers welcome warmly!

Good interactive media are the deus ex machina that saves naive "methodologies" from themselves.  Particularly in the field of language learning, flexible-response exercises and flexible-response objective tests are sorely needed to restore the student's faith that his study efforts can reliably produce the measurable achievement of defined learning goals in all four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Increasingly, language teachers are realizing that textbook-based pseudo-immersion approaches, pretending to imitate the methods of total immersion language schools in foreign countries, cannot provide the necessary real-world language exposure outside of class to be similarly successful.  "Immersion" that is not total is an oxymoron!

With their current resources the fashionable European "communicative" approaches are well-meaning, if naive, deceptions, because they are not robust enough to benefit more than a handful of linguistically acquisitive students favoring an inductive learning style. Practitioners of the so-called "natural approach" underestimate the usefulness of the analytical student's ability, desire, and need to comprehend and consciously practice using the structural features of highly-inflected languages.

Many authors of such materials fail to appreciate the value of mimicry and memorization as aids to mastery.  They usually fail to provide sufficient grammar and word-usage exercises with immediate feedback for incremental learning.  Many students are left with fragmented, incomplete competencies.

What's the solution?--A partnership of these two approaches satisfies the student's well-documented learning needs!  What are the components of this partnership?

1. An extensive, varied, and interesting offering of highly interactive, flexible-response, multimedia learning and self-evaluation material, available to the student online 24hrs. x 7days/week, using the foreign language as the medium of instruction;

2. A parallel conversational ("communicative") classroom / tutorial environment, using the foreign language as the medium of instruction.

Together the student and the computer do the "heavy lifting" of language learning outside class, while the teacher/tutor provides the necessary human interactivity in class.  Good teachers remain an essential ingredient in language learning.  Just as audio-visual aids have long done, good interactive programs amplify the teacher's effectiveness.  And we've built the software systems that make that happen!

What about maintaining or recovering hard-won language skills?   ScottNet's^® Lifelong Language^™ interactive online multimedia tutorials are rich, varied, up-to-date, and ever-expanding.  They are the most interesting, effective, and affordable solution conceivable for life-long language skill maintenance and enhancement.

What kind of instructor should consider authoring interactive online materials?

If you wish to use our tutorial program, make sure the subject-matter content is well-defined; not nebulous or mysterious.  So ask yourself these questions:

• Can I describe in concrete terms what I expect my students to study, learn, know, and perform: e.g. specific symbols, words, phrases, formulas, idioms, sentences, conversations, stories?
• Can I test this content in questions cued with text, sound, and images, whose typewritten answers students should be able to recognize or supply?
• Am I willing to give the necessary time and thought to creating a large number of quiz questions for each learning unit: e.g. 20-200?
• Am I willing to give the necessary time and thought to an even larger number of possible, allowed responses to each question: e.g. true-false, matching, fill-in, text responses of one-word to short sentence length?
• Am I willing to give the necessary time and thought to an even larger number of feedback responses for incorrect answers to each question.
• Am I willing to collect or produce the necessary images and sounds to cue student responses?
• Am I willing to maintain this data, making corrections, additions and deletions as required?