Educators the Rock interview

FindingEducation has profiled some awesome educators in the last few weeks including many that I admire like dana boyd, Joyce Valenza and David lee King.

And now I find that I’m honored to now be among them. Here's my interview that came out just before Thanksgiving...

Educators That Rock!: Helene Blowers

Friday’s Thought – Creativity & Art

I had the fortune to meet Scott Adams several years ago during the height of Dilbert mania. He autographed a oversized comic strip for me that I gave to my husband many years ago framed.

Anyway, I just love this thought from Scott on the relationship of creativity to art. It reminds me that it’s often not just what you put into the process that’s important, it’s what you take out that sets it apart.

Friday’s Thought – Best Practices

I create this slide almost exactly a year ago after being inspired by the thoughts from a comment left on my blog by Dave Ferguson. Here’s the original post from 11/08 and the slide that it inspired.



Have a similar thought to share, please add comment to this post. Thx.

21st Century Libraries keynote ( Greece)

Event was part of the Megaron Plus Lecture Series - Athens, Greece (Nov 11, 2009).

Most of the time when I have the pleasure to speak to audiences about the future of libraries, I'm usually talking a room of librarians or educators. Last week was a little bit different. Last week I had the pleasure to talking to a large group of community citizens at the Megraron, Athens premiere music and cultural center.

Granted, I know that there were many librarians and library officials in the audience -- the nature of the program topic, The 21st Century Library, would naturally attract such a crowd) but the audience was also full of just regular community members (students, business men and even one famous politician - whom I don't know his name) who were just there to learn more about 21st century libraries and to appreciate the free cultural lecture series that is supported by Megaron Plus.

Anyway, the great audience questions and participation at the end did make the event a highlight. For those that asked, here are the slides from my keynote (a condensed and updated version of much longer I have done before). Thanks to all for a great evening of thoughts and conversation.

Finding Pheonix Athens

View more presentations from hblowers.

Future Library - Greece

Friday's Thought - Innovation

This Friday thought comes my own thinking about the necessary ingredients for innovation. I feel fortunate to have worked in organizations that have valued pushing the envelope on new ideas and services and from my experience, these four elements have been the key to success.



Got a innovation quote or thought that you love, please let me know in the comments. I’m always up for a bit of new wisdom.

Friday's Thought - Learning

I really love this quote and thought it paired beautifully with this photo of a 101 year-old learner exploring an iPhone app for the very first time.


I really need acknowledge and thank my good friend Tony Tallent for granting me permission to use this wonderful photo he took of his grandmother Carrie. Although I never had the opportunity to meet her, I know that she was amazing woman who despite having been raised in rural uneducated community embodied the notion of lifelong learning.

Thanks again Tony for allowing me to share this photo. I can only imagine how much change Carrie saw in her 101 years of life and from the photo, you can tell that she embraced it with curiosity.

The Secret to Learning is Unlearning

[ Note: I was thrilled to be asked by Michael & David to contribute some thoughts to their great Library 101 project. Here's a copy of what I wrote.]

“The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and re-learn.” – Alvin Toffler

Unlearning is a concept that really seems to be underrated. But within the context of knowledge building and learning capacity, I’ve come to recognize that it’s a foundational skill that shouldn’t be ignored. In order to learn new things, you have to be open to new ideas. And in order to be open to new ideas, you have to be willing to challenge your own fixed thinking and natural biases.

Everyone has a natural learning aptitude. Some people refer to this as human nature. Place a block or a 3d object in front of an infant, and they will naturally pick it up, explore its surface, and then more often than not engage in further sensory discovery by sticking it in their mouth. But as we grow older our educational encounters tend to move away from open and unstructured discovery exploration towards more knowledge building activities that are centered around the creation of human habits (examples: formal and rote learning).

Rote learning techniques are good for mastering multiplication tables or for memorizing state capitals. Formal learning best supports knowledge transfer between teachers and students. But when it comes to keeping up with technology and new emerging information channels, human habits will only you take so far. In order to keep up with today’s constant and rapid changes, you need to be able to quickly learn new skills, techniques and approaches by being able to adapt, challenge and even unlearn some of the natural learning biases have become your own human nature.

Here are a few unlearning tips and techniques to help open your mind and get you started:

Seek out the unfamiliar - Our natural tendency when confronted with a new technology or learning opportunity is to seek the familiar and build upon concepts that we already know. This is a good step for transitioning to new technologies, but it can also be limiting if this is only as far as you go. With every new breakthrough technology there is often a new concept or functionality to wrap your head around. To grasp learning in these areas, you need to consciously seek out the unfamiliar in order to explore and discover new things.

For me this tip is actually very timely, as I have just this week received an invite to preview Google Wave. After playing with it for a day or two, I noticed that all I had done was use the new online communication application as a traditional text-based email client and that I was missing out on learning about its other features. It was only when I chose to consciously explore links and other features that I discovered I could insert videos, chat and embed shared applications (called extensions) that can enable real-time collaboration.

Change your learning location – There’s nothing like changing your physical environment to help heighten your senses when you’re learning something new. Like traveling to a foreign country, new surroundings can help you take notice of small things that might otherwise go unnoticed because they blend into the familiar of your conscious.

There is, of course, a flip side to this tip — unfamiliar environments can also sometimes create attention distractions. Therefore, in seeking out new locations to help you open up to new learning possibilities (and unlearn old habits), it’s important to make sure the environment that you select is physically comfortable, but psychologically unfamiliar.

Engage in learning with professional opposites - Your educational and professional training can also predispose and limit your ability to see things from fresh perspective. Whenever possible, it’s helpful to engage in learning experiences with professionals from different backgrounds (marketing, architecture, hospitality, etc.) and especially those that you might consider your polar opposites (for librarians that specialize in selecting and finding quality information, one polar opposite might be marketing, whose specialization is creating emotional attachments to brands). When you expose yourself to other avenues of professional thinking, you open up an unlearning channel to discover something new.

Pair your learning with a child – There’s often no better way to open up yourself to learning techniques then to pair yourself with a child. Not only is their perspective much different when it comes to technology, the way they are being taught to learn through today’s education system is much, much different from the educational philosophy of twenty or thirty years ago.

When I was a child the three R’s stood for reading, writing, and arithmetic. But today in many educational systems, the tenets of the new 3 R’s are rigor (provide challenging learning experiences in their classrooms) relevance (how learning applies to real life), and relationships (building learning connections with and for students). There’s a lot to be learned from these new techniques and areas of emphasis and children can be natural teachers and modelers. Pairing up with a child (or any member of a younger generation) is great way to not only discover new approaches to learning and rethink practices from your educational past, but a wonderful way to discover those obvious/not-so-obvious questions that adults can overlook

Act like a toddler: get deeply curious – My last tip for creating a your own personal arsenal of unlearning techniques is to try and go back to your first learning experiences and explore new things as a young child would do. Try and engage as many of your five senses that you can in your learning and constantly investigate things through trial and error. In essence, simply get back to the pure roots of curiosity and “play.” Curiosity is a natural aptitude that we all are born with. But it can also be a trait that that diminishes with education and age. To keep yourself open new ideas and unlearn the knowledge road blocks that might be keeping you from being immensely inquisitive, try imagining learning like a toddler and get deeply curious.

Overall the concept of unlearning is to simply and continuously to challenge yourself to think and learn about things from different perspectives and different angles. And in a world where new technological advances have us moving at lightening speed, it’s our unlearning skills, more often then our learning ones, that can give us the greatest competitive advantage.

Friday’s Thought

It must come from my many years of creating and building presentations that whenever I stumble upon a great quote that moves or inspires me, I immediately grab it and dump it in my misc_slides file.

Although the contributions to this file have grown significantly over the past few years, many of my favorite quotes/slides actually have never been incorporated into a talk. So rather then just leave those slides hidden in my flash drive, I’ve decided to post the collection over the next few weeks, one slide every Friday.

Here’s the first:



If you have a favorite quote related to this thought, please add to the comments. I’m always up for a little inspiration.

Library 101

Just a little bit of 101 sharing:

eReader Race Continues

There's so much happening in the ultimate eReader race these days, that rarely a week goes without some significant new development is announced. In just this past week alone, Barnes & Noble unveiled the Nook, Plastic Logic revealed it's new Que reader and Entourage announced it will begin selling it's new dual screen eReader, named the eDGe, in February.

In fact, there's so much going on these days, that Fast Company has finally added a permanent e-reader topic page/tag to its site to help you stay on top of all the developments.



The race is really heating up. It looks like 2010 will indeed be the year of the eReader.

Related post: Trendwatching: The eBook Device Race

Social Media Strategy Framework

I don’t do nearly as many presentations and talks about social networking as I use to, but I am always interested in new ideas and strategies that fit into this area. Ross Dawson founder of Advancing Human Technologies has developed the best overall strategy map that I seen for understanding how to utilize the social media space. The key (& critical first step) to both developing a strategy and in engaging your customers, is quite simply, Learning!


Social Media Strategy Framework

As I spoken on the subject of web 2.0 technologies and social networking repeatedly over the last four years, I always been amazed by the number of CEOs and Directors that express an active interest in helping their organizations shape strategies, policies and practices in this space, yet see no benefit for them to learn or engage in it themselves.

Whenever I come across this, I’m reminded of a point that I’ve often heard Stephen Abram share with folks, paraphrased in my words here --- You can’t have informed opinion about the use and application of social networking tools, if you haven’t gained some knowledge yourself based upon personal exploration and experience.

Stephen actually posted some more great thoughts related to this in his recent post, Facebook is no fad. Here’s a quote related to libraries, that really resonated with me.

“information professionals have a professional obligation to learn and evaluate all major new technologies and determine when and where these might be useful in the service of learning, community and the social good.”

In order to learn and be knowledgeable about social media, quite honestly, you have to try it out and live for awhile in the space. The typical rules of engagement long formed by corporate growth and policy don’t apply to social media. Social media is all about the engaging individual (& their scope of personal influence) it’s not about extending your organization’s traditional marketing approach and techniques out into new channels.

Take a look Ross’s framework, I think it does an excellent job in supporting the notion that you need to learn and gain experience in order to understand the full capabilities that social media can offer your organization.

Quick Access Kiosk

It's been awhile in the making, but I couldn't be more thrilled to see the results. This week, all of our branch locations will be coming up on the new Quick Access kiosk, which is designed to overlay on top of all our dedicated branch catalog PCs and centralize several key functions (library card sign-up, easy access to electronic resources, my account, etc) for our customers.

What I love about the kiosk is not only it's design and strong alignment with our other marketing materials, but it's also customized to deliver branch specific information (control by script that detects the IP range assigned to the location) to highlight upcoming programs and hours of operation. It also utilizes this script to display a friendly face from member that works in that branch. :)

Here's a preview of the Shepard branch kiosk. To see what the versions look like, check out this Flickr set.



A huge thank you to Mike, Limin, Macrina and the all the members of the DS & CRD teams who pulled together on this one. The results look amazing!

ACLA Talk - 24th Thing

In Pittsburgh this am to do a talk for the Allegheny County Library Association (ACLA). My talk is titled the 24th Thing in part because many of the member libraries just completed 23 Things. But it's also titled this because I'm often asked the question "what's the next thing?" For me the "thing" isn't a specific technology. It's a shift in mindset that we need to begin applying 24/7 to our thinking about library services.

Here is a link to my slidedeck that helps outline my thinking, The 24th Thing

Thoughts on the Information Age

The secret formula. . .

... to building online experiences.


If you think about it, it really is that easy. It's navigating the transitions between the two that tend to trip things up. :)

Thank you Hugh MacLeod | Gapingvoid

21st Century Literacies

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and hearing Howard Rheingold speak before. He’s a interesting speaker, author, and self-proclaimed “online instigator” who wears hand-painted shoes. But all this aside, Howard is also good at honing in on cultural trends and exploring the implications to society and humanity.

In this recent talk for Reboot Britain (July 09) Howard talks about five critical 21st century literacies. Need a good boost for your brain (or a self-directive cont. education experiences) take 40 minutes to watch, or listen to Howard.

Taken from Howard Reingold’s talk (July 2009)


Howard Rheingold's 21st century literacies:

• Attention- knowing how to focus and how to divide your attention without losing the ability to concentrate. It’s more than multitasking; it’s learning how to exercise attention.
  
• Participation- particularly the more constructive modes of participation that are useful to others
  
• Collaboration- being ready to organize together, and enable a collective response to emerge
  
• Critical consumption-aka “crap detection” the ability to spot bad info from good.
  
• Network awareness- the combination of reputation, social capital, “presentation of self” and other sensitivity to individual positioning within the network collective.

Here's two other tidbits I gathered from his talk:
Literacies = skills + community
Fluency means being able to master these five literacies together.

Important stuff and a good jumping off point for a discussion in libraries and/or education. How do we support the development of these new, and different kind of literacies? How can our services evolve to enable greater participation, collaboration and encourage critical consumption?

Trendwatching: The ebook device race

Like many people, I’m a trendwatcher. I enjoy scanning the landscape and seeing how trends emerge. One that I’ve been watching keenly this past year is the technology device race for the ultimate e-book. Amazon’s Kindle (which launched Nov 16, 2007) started a new race that has really taken off within the last year. And now it seems almost every major viable tech company is working on some top secret (term used loosely, because we all know that leaks and rumors are critical to creating hype around new product launches) project that is tied to this race.

The latest development in this race came yesterday with the news that Microsoft is working on new dual foldable tablet project called “The Courier” (video showing the concept for the courier).

Anyway, as I said above I’m a trendwatcher. And since this latest development I think is worthy of noting, I've also updated the slide deck from one of my recent talks on the trends and the future of libraries and decided to isolate my slides from just this one trend so that I can share them here.

Trend: The Kindle rekindles the flame (and race) for the ultimate digital book

Trendwatch: eBook Race

View more presentations from hblowers.

I’m curious to know what other developments you have seen in the ultimate eBook device race? Where are you seeing this trend heading? And, of course, what does it mean to libraries?

Sidewalk chalk engagement

Over the past three years I’ve talked about and highlighted a lot examples that exemplify customer engagement. When it’s the most difficult to do, is when your customers are not only upset, they are anonymous.

Take a look at this story from Jenica Rogers-Urbank .


Indeed engagement comes in many forms … even sidewalk chalk. :)

Filed under: Brilliant!

Lose control ... stream small ... create socially!

Although those of you who have read my site for a while know that I'm not a huge fan of the term "social media", I couldn't help but fall in love with this slide deck from Seth Goldstein that so eloquently hones in on three important story telling engagement strategies:

1) Lose Control
2) Stream small
3) Create socially

Social Media Stories 2.0

View more documents from seth goldstein.

Think about Seth's three concepts. Can they be applied to libraries - not only virtually, but physically?

It's got me thinking. How about you?

Augmented Reality Redux

A funny spoof on GPS:



...and a few more AR apps:

Google's Skymap for Android
Worksnug - find great wi-fi enabled places to work
Augmented ID - a AR concept that visualizes the digital identities of people you meet in real life using face recognition technology.
Sun Seeker - locate the path of the sun and determine which homes have the best light.


Related post: Augmented Reality: "There's an app for that"