Jean Baker

Educational Change by Design: A school for the future

Jan 15, 2021

How do we design a school for the future? This recent article seeks to capture (in the form of a case study) our recent experience in designing such a school. The design process was a collaborative process involving a partnership with a local school district and the...

Vinit Masram (1988 – 2023)

Jul 16, 2023

I found out about Vinit Masram's passing a week or so go. I did not know Vinit personally, having met him just once, at IDC's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2020. But the news of his death hit me hard. I had been a fan of his work for a long time - having stumbled on...

Palindromic poetry in prison, introducing Sandra Gould Ford

Jan 18, 2010

Those who follow this blog know that I love visual wordplay. This is most commonly seen in my ambigram work but another area where I have spent some time is in writing palindromic poetry. I wrote a whole series of poems when I was in graduate school at Illinois and...

The (type)face of Obama

Apr 10, 2008

As a follow-up to a previous posting about the many (type)faces of politics, here is an article in the NYTimes titled To the letter born, discussing the manner in which the Obama campaign has leveraged the use of typography in their campaign.

Cheating in a test, why that’s the way to go

Apr 26, 2013

I just read this wonderful essay by UCLA professor Peter Nonacs titled: Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Game Theory Exam. In this essay he describes an experiment he recently conducted in his game theory class. This is what he told his students a week before the...

Incorrect Scientific Simulations as an educational tool: Vibe coding the wrong way

Mar 2, 2025

What happens when you drop a ball while running? Will it fall in front of you, at your feet or behind you? Most people are convinced it will fall behind them. Makes perfect sense, right? Where will the ball fall? Then there's the famous textbook problem of a monkey...

Understanding student engagement

Jan 22, 2013

I had posted recently about a Gallup poll on student engagement. Essentially the poll showed that student engagement dropped precipitously (though as I wrote, not as starkly as their graph indicated) as students moved from elementary to high school. My friend, Gaurav...

Representing me

Oct 24, 2008

Sharon Guan with the Instructional Design & Development Group at DePaul University has invited me to present at a faculty conference next April. I will be speaking about the manner in which new technologies are pushing us to blur the lines between the professional and...

Googling me…