Here is a new text that fulfills an emerging need in both higher and public education and stands to break new ground in addressing critical skills required of graduates. When working on their last book, It Works for Me, Creatively, the authors realized that the future belongs to the right-brained. While Daniel Pink and other visionaries may have oversimplified a bit, higher education is ripe for the creative campus, while secondary education is desperately seeking a complement to the growing assessment/teach-to-the-test mentality. You don't have to study the 2010 IBM survey of prominent American CEOs to know that the number one skill business wants is students who can think creatively. To meet the demand of new courses, programs, and curricula, the authors have developed a 200-page "textbook" suitable for secondary or higher education courses that are jumping on this bandwagon. Introduction to Applied Creative Thinking, as the title suggests, focuses not on just developing the skills necessary for creative thinking, but on having students apply those skills; after all, true creative thinking demands making something that is both novel and useful. Such a book may also be used successfully by professional developers in business and education. For this book, Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet are joined in authorship by Rusty Carpenter. He not only directs Eastern Kentucky University's Noel Studio for Academic Creativity but has co-edited a book on that subject, Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, and Community Partnerships (2011) and the forthcoming Cases on Higher Education Spaces (2012). Introduction to Applied Creative Thinking is student-friendly. Every chapter is laced with exercises, assignments, summaries, and generative spaces. Order copies now or contact the publisher for further information.

The authors' purpose in this seventh book in the "It Works for Me" series is to demonstrate that "everyone possesses creative talent, though it may be latent in some and difficult to bring out in others. It's not just a talent possessed by artists and engineers, mind you, but everyone." Furthermore, "Creative people have figured out consciously or un- that a small seed of creativity can be made to grow by having the proper environment and a minimal set of skills. And people can be taught or self-taught this process." The authors/editors also believe that "all creative ideas link themselves to other creative ideas to develop something new and useful, be it a concept, a process, or a product. In order to disseminate and perpetuate their] belief that the creative impulse resides in all of us, they] have asked a host of friends to demonstrate it with essays and practical tips touching on supportive creative environments, strategies that foster and enhance creativity, and assessments that demonstrate creativity has indeed taken place." This easy-to-follow guide is separated into several sections: Overviews The Creative Process The Creative Environment The Creative Product Assessing Creativity. Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet have each won the prestigious Acorn Award, which is presented annually to the outstanding college professor in the state of Kentucky. In addition, they have over 800 publications, including 12 books, articles running the gamut from literary criticism to educational research, and popular fiction. Other books in the "It Works for Me" series can be ordered from New Forums Press.

Seldom do readers have an opportunity to see inside the worlds of other writers. This makes "It Works for Me: Becoming a Publishing Scholar/Researcher" very special. The contributors to this book are inviting us to visit their private worlds. Before you begin exploring their worlds, think about your own world of scholarship, and sort out the topics that you find the most exciting. This reflection will prepare you to do more than visit these other worlds; once inside each world, you want to immediately look around and take something back with you. Knowing your passions in advance will enable you to capture those ideas that connect to your own world.

The authors' purpose in this book remains the same as that of their first-to provide "a collection of practical tips drawn from real-life experiences." However, their sources have expanded. In the first book they drew from only Kentucky institutions of higher learning, but in this latest collection they present advice from across the country. Thanks should go to all the contributors, especially the attendees of the Lilly Conference on College Teaching, for submitting such a wide scope and high quality of tips.

It Works For Me, Online is designed primarily to aid instructors in two major types of classes: fully online and web-enhanced/hybrid courses. Those who teach fully online classes will find tips on such things as tricks you can use with synchronous chats, how to use blogging in your classroom to replace traditional chat-rooms (talk about your superannuation), and even ways of adapting Blackboard to meet administrative needs. Those who prefer web enhancements to the traditional classroom will find advice to navigate between the virtual and real world. And, truthfully, we are hopeful that even dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying Luddites will skim through these pages and realize it is possible for old dogs to learn new tricks (we and many of our contributors are either retiring or nearing retirement, yet found the brave new world of technology as exciting as we did our Erector Sets as kids or learning to beat our own kids at Pac-Man). Use It Works For Me, Online both as a handy desk companion filled with practical strategies and as a springboard for generating your own strategies for making your classes as effective as possible. Like the first two books in this series, It Works For Me and It Works For Me, Too, this handbook runs the gamut from short to long pieces, from very course-specific suggestions to general pieces, from some theoretical applications to down-to-earth tactics. But the following tips share one important common characteristic-they all work.