Quotes about "Mr. Meatloaf" and other Important Matters

Mr. Meatloaf photo by Steffen Löwe Gera  

"Schools need to shift from differentiation to customization/personalization.  They need to allow students to define relevance and meaning, to sift through multiple media choices, to organize information according to the meaning they create rather than the teacher-driven transmission of conceptual systems.  Schools could also learn to create fewer options and provide more freedom, relying on the power of freedom and simplicity to generate creativity and authenticity." -- John T. Spencer

"Entertainers get honorifics in the Times, so you’ll read stories about the Rolling Stones you’ll see references to Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards. (The Times reviewer of this Meat Loaf concert apparently couldn’t bring himself to writing the laugh-out-loud 'Mr. Loaf,' and just used 'Meat Loaf' throughout.)" -- Dan Gillmor

"Few technology uses are cooler than FaceTime video chatting with your child when you're separated by many miles." -- Wesley Fryer

"While the iPad has been outselling the Mac for a few quarters now, remarkably, the iPad is now already bigger business than the Mac overall (the Mac obviously has a much higher average selling price, which had kept it ahead). Apple sold more than twice as many iPads as Macs last quarter.iPod sales continue to fall fast (down 20 percent year over year) and that’s with the strong-selling iPod touch, which makes up more than half of all iPod sales." -- MG Siegler

"I always hated working in groups as a student. But now, I work with groups all the time. In some ways, I couldn't function professionally without my network. That network -- that group ever changing and evolving in thought and substance -- is the circulatory system at the heart of what I think about when I think about education." -- Shelly Blake-Plock


"If you’re a public school educator in the U.S. right now, how can you not be angry? How can you not be doing something, even if it is just a profanity laced Tweet? The profession is being trampled. Politicians and businessmen with no background in education are driving reform. And our students are stuck in a system that still thinks it’s the 19th Century. By any standard, including the tests, our kids are not being well served, especially those who live in poverty." -- Will Richardson

Getting Active with Mediactive

Dan Gilmour has a project called , Mediactive.  He calls this "a combination website plus book plus more — an initiative that aims to help folks navigate the media flow that we’re all facing in this new age."


Gillmor teaches and directs a media center at Arizona State University.   His stated goal "is to help people become active and informed users of media, as consumers and as creators. We are in a media-saturated age, more so all the time, and we need to find ways to use media to our — and our society’s — best advantage."


I purchased the ebook and have been following the blog.  Already, my students and I have benefited from his principles for media consumers.  I've included some excerpts, below.

1. Be skeptical of absolutely everything.

We can never take entirely for granted the absolute trustworthiness of what we read, see or hear from media of any kind. This is the case for information from traditional news organizations, blogs, online videos and every other form. . . .the unfortunate tendency of assigning apparently equal weight to opposing viewpoints when one is right and the other is wrong, are not adequate substitutes for actual journalism; you don’t need a quote from Hitler when you’re doing a story about the Holocaust. The reader/listener/viewer needs to keep an eye out for such behavior.

2. Although skepticism is essential, don’t be equally skeptical of everything.

. . . .Part of our development as human beings is the creation of what we might call  . . . .a “trust meter” instead of a BS meter. Either way, I imagine it ranging, say, from +30 to –30. Using that scale, a news article in the New York Timesor Wall Street Journal might start out in strongly positive territory, perhaps at +26 or +27 on the trust meter. (I can think of very few journalists who start at +30 on any topic.)An anonymous comment on a random blog, by contrast, starts with negative credibility, say –26 or –27. . . .

3. Go outside your personal comfort zone.

The “echo chamber” effect–our tendency as human beings to seek information that we’re likely to agree with–is well known. To be well informed, we need to seek out and pay attention to sources of information that will offer new perspectives and challenge our own assumptions. 

4. Ask more questions.

This principle goes by many names: research, reporting, homework, and many others. The more personal or important you consider the topic at hand, the more essential it becomes to follow up on the media that cover the topic.

5. Understand and learn media techniques.

Media-creation skills are becoming part of the development process for many children in the developed world, less so for children in the developing world. In America and other economically advanced nations, teenagers and even younger children are digital natives.

These principles make complete sense to me, and I have shared them with my kids.  I recommend that you check out the project and see if there is something there for you too.