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So it's worth taking a careful look at whether the company will once again create a new category of device that make waves in education -- as it did with personal computers, digital music players, and smartphones -- or whether the iPad and other tabletss might be doomed to remain a niche offering.

Mr. Jobs did mention iTunesU twice when listing the kinds of content that could be viewed on the iPad, referring to the company's partnership with many colleges to offer them free space for multimedia content like lecture recordings. But he otherwise focused on consumer uses -- watching movies, viewing photos, sending e-mail messages, and reading novels published by five trade publishers mentioned at the event. That does not mean that the company won't later promote the iPad's use on campuses, though, since it waited until after iPods and iPhones were established before beginning to work more heavily with colleges to promote those in education.

the biggest impact of the iPad would be in the textbook market.

"How can we possibly teach reading when our kids just won't read?"

classrooms are one of the only text-driven environments that our students experience. Beyond school, U.S. students spend most of their time with media consuming digital information from televisions, radios, and computers. Much of this electronic information is visual or is processed passively, in small bites.

So how can you drag the wayward brains in your classroom back to deeper reading? Begin by recognizing that today's students are driven by opportunities to interact with one another. Conversations—whether they are started on Facebook, through text messages, or in the hallways—play a central role in adolescents' lives. Understanding that participation is a priority, the best teachers create social reading experiences and blur lines between fun and work.

now that e-readers are cheaper and more plentiful, they have gone mass market, reaching consumers across age and demographic groups, and enticing some members of the younger generation to pick them up for the first time.

Kids are drawn to the devices, and there’s a definite desire by parents to move books into this format,” Ms. Vila said. “Now you’re finding people who are saying: ‘Let’s use the platform. Let’s use it as a way for kids to learn.’ 

I didn’t buy it until I knew that the teachers in middle school were allowing kids to read their books on their e-readers

too busy to write lengthy posts

uninspired by a lack of readers

social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family

This open-ended series of models allows students to experiment with virtual ecosystems and test their hypotheses about producer/consumer and predator/prey relationships.

Increasingly, students are buying an "experience" instead of earning an education, and, in the competition to attract customers, that's what's colleges are selling.

The common experience is that getting admitted is the most exhausting part. After that, the struggle mainly is financial. But at the major universities, most professors are too busy to care about individual students, and it is easy to become lost amid a sea of equally disenchanted undergraduates looking for some kind of purpose—and not finding it.

Academically Adrift ends on a depressing note: "A renewed commitment to improving undergraduate education is unlikely to occur without changes to the organizational cultures of colleges and universities." Institutions are inherently conservative; they do not change easily. Many leaps of faith are necessary, and the people involved—teachers, students, parents, administrators, lawmakers, and others—have so many fundamental disagreements about the purposes of higher education that it is hard to know where to begin the conversation. It's far easier to make cuts to an inherently broken system than to begin building something new.

You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to step away from the shore

doing something unprecedented is not just adventurous but imperative, and that the far bigger risk is focusing on current competitors as the barometer of strategy.

Eliminating competition by trying to beat it is dangerously shortsighted. It deflects the attention and the resources of an organization away from the far more important and exciting question of how to shape consumer lifestyles. 

The hearings signal that the growing list of studies suggesting a link between artificial colorings and behavioral changes in children has at least gotten regulators’ attention — and, for consumer advocates, that in itself is a victory. In a concluding report, staff scientists from the F.D.A. wrote that while typical children might be unaffected by the dyes, those with behavioral disorders might have their conditions “exacerbated by exposure to a number of substances in food, including, but not limited to, synthetic color additives.”

“The family was in the same room, but not together,”

One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities

Never has there been so much to consume, on so many devices.

IMHO iAnnotate is far superior. There are a couple of areas GoodReader excels (like in the automatic page fit, having two up, etc), but by and large iAnnotate does everything else more effectively. These are just a few reasons why it suits my workflow better than GoodReader: - Tabs. It speaks for itself, but having several documents open with the ability to flick between them is useful. - Sharing features. The ability to email or paste to clipboard a summary of all notes/highlights/annotations you've made is just brilliant, and makes light work of noting the most poignant areas in an academic article. - Annotation tools. They are far quicker to access than in GoodReader. If you want to highlight something in iAnnotate, you just tap the icon in the toolbar and drag it over the text (as much as you want – you can scroll through the document even with the highlight tool selected) before confirming your selection. You can set as many different colour highlighters up as you want. By contrast, in GoodReader you must tap-and-hold, drag the handles to select a continuous chunk of text, then tap highlight from the popup. If you want to change the colour of the highlight you need to tap, choose colour, confirm your choice; using multiple colours is just too time consuming. I prefer the behaviour of notes in iAnnotate too, for reviewing and revision purposes. Tapping every note in GoodReader is tiresome.

world economy has continued its expansion

2014 economic global growth is thought likely by major forecasters to be a bit higher than in 2013

growth is coming from the advanced countries