by I am quoted in this weekend’s edition of Parade Magazine. After a long conversation with a reporter, fact-checking and a several month delay, I have two sentences in the article, Can Video Games Teach Kids?
Parade has a circulation of 33,000,000 and is read by “72.775 million Americans every week.” By my calculations, that’s approximately 10 million times more readers than the number of people who read my blog. It’s 
9.9999 million times the number of edubloggers in the universe.
There are other benefits of being quoted in Parade Magazine:
- I’m finally in a publication read by my mother!
- I found a yummy recipe for Cinnamon Pinwheels right before the article on How to Manage Your Diabetes (not eating the cinnamon pinwheels?)
- Who knew that Ryan Seacrest wakes up at 4 AM?
Parade contacted me based on a 2007 article I published in District Administration Magazine, Edugaming – A Bad Idea for All Ages.
One day I’ll write at greater length about the ridiculous assumptions underlying the creation of a school built on a video game curriculum.
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
The piece captured at least the essence of what you had to say, right? I had a similar but but more compacted experience some years ago. Someone from Good Housekeeping gave me a call. She was very sharp and for thirty minutes we had a lively, nuanced conversation in which it was clear that she’d done a lot of background reading and knew ahead of time where the fuzzy bits were. Her questions were insightful and led in surprising directions. It may be the most fun I’ve ever had in an interview.
Then when the article came out, the only trace of that half hour was one or two lines in which I was quoted as saying, basically, “Duh… computers are GOOD!”.
Congrats, Gary. It certainly IS amazing to compare the reach of mainstream media relative to blogs / social media.
Hello, Gary,
After reading the article (and, admittedly, gagging several times at the craptastic prose of said article), I have to wonder: what do you think of the piece?
After reading it, it sounds like yet another breathless, superficial puff piece about how education could be so much cooler if we just let the kids play.
For example: “But what seizes the interest of today’s sixth-graders may be entirely different from what engaged earlier generations. These young people have only ever known a world with the hands-on, immediate interactivity of the Internet and video games.”
This quotation appears to perpetuate the myth of the digital native, and the flawed notion that a few years of video games can cause a profound change in human behavior, social patterns, and learning patterns.
So, what do you think of the actual article?
Cheers,
Bill
Hey Gary,
At least you are published in a US magazine. My recent newspaper and TV coverage has all been in Brazil – doesn’t do squat for the US audience. By the way, the latest article about my work was in a magazine that had a great recipe for cheese bread.
Well, back to crafting avatars for Second Life Redux: The Home School Version
David
Hmmmm….after reading your post the first hyperlink I went back and clicked on was the one for Cinnamon Pinwheels…I wonder what that says about me.
I started my family at a very young age and made a vow to myself to never subscribe to or read a “mom” magazine, ever! But I am sure your quote is brilliant! As for the pinwheel cookies–I am a self-taught cookie genius, so I’ll be just fine 🙂 Congrats!