Opinion

After investing nearly 16 years in a full-time faculty job, Carolyn Foster Segal gives it up -- and suggests that others ask some hard questions before taking jobs like hers.

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Apple’s latest foray into the education market caught my eye. It’s promising, but I can’t get past some sticking points.

By Dean Dad

The Calculus book I use sometimes uses intricate algebra to find very involved ways to present an answer in the simplest form. Although I encourage students to manipulate terms to see how they arrived at the given answers, I sometimes find myself telling my students that “the meaning of life is not to match the answer in the back of the book.” This, of course, avoids the question of exactly what the meaning of life is. I thought of this recently as I spent a lovely afternoon with a friend and her daughter watching a production

By Rosemarie Emanuele

The Inference Engine anticipated much of what Apple announced in NYC on Thursday. Some interesting questions remain.

By Kenneth C. Green

Katharine Hayhoe is an associate professor of geoscience at Texas Tech, a climate researcher who has suggested the northeastern USA prepare for hotter summers and shorter winters, and the deeply Christian wife of an evangelical preacher. She was invited by Newt Gingrich's co-author to contribute the opening chapter on climate change to an upcoming book on environmental entrepreneurship. Of course, that was before Newt decided to run for the presidency, felt the need to atone for his moment on the couch with Nancy Pelosi, determined that "conservatism" referred to conserving destructive momentum rather than conserving the earth, and spiked Hayhoe's chapter which explained why environmental entrepreneurs were any more valuable than the inventor of the next pet rock or chia head.

By G. Rendell

I was sitting down to a meeting with one of my committee members. He was telling me about a phone call he had just received from a colleague asking if he knew anything about a “Katy Meyers” because she was doing some good work online that was worth checking out. Hearing things like that is not only a great confidence booster, but it means that I’m doing something right. My name is spreading in my field, and in a positive manner associated with my academic work. I’m not going to say I’m a genius at managing my identity, but if you Google my name without any qualifiers, I dominate the first page. Creating a recognizable brand is a way of managing your academic identity. You want your brand to be just as recognizable, even if its just in your discipline.

By Katy Meyers

The Apple Education Event is now available to watch online. Have you checked it out yet? We will have to see how this all plays out in the next 24 months, if Apple's push for iPad textbooks gains any significant market share (vs. mindshare), if textbook prices move at all, and how other digital textbook players such as Inkling, Chegg, and Kno are impacted.

By Joshua Kim