Broadband money starts flowing to create ‘culture of use’

Every week, at least once and often more, about 30 kids in several western Minnesota schools sit down at camera-equipped computers, put on headphones and launch into individual speech therapy lessons.

Miles away, a therapist talks to them and shows them written words or phrases on their computers, then watches how they move their lips and tongues as they pronounce words. Because the therapist doesn't have to travel, schedules are more flexible and school districts save money. And the students may even learn faster than they would with face-to-face sessions.

Your stimulus dollars at work.

A lot of attention has been paid to the big stimulus-funded broadband projects under way to improve high-speed access to the Internet. Minnesota communities and companies are receiving more than $200 million for construction projects that will lay hundreds of miles of fiber optic cable.

But in the meantime, money last month started flowing through a different kind of stimulus grant aimed at getting more Minnesotans to make better use of the access they have.

The long-distance speech therapy lessons form one of more than 60 projects being assisted with a $4.9 million grant administered by the Blandin Foundation. So far, three schools in the nine-member Midwest Special Education Cooperatiave use the long-distance speech therapy program, and the Blandin grant will let it expand to six or seven by the end of the school year, says Todd Travis, director of special education. Eventually, the project could benefit students in Browns Valley, Chokio-Alberta, Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley, Cyrus, Hancock, Herman-Norcross, Morris, Wheaton and West Central Area school districts.

Travis says the results are promising, possibly even better than conducting such sessions in person because of the quality of the sound and the video and because kids today adapt so easily to video. "As humans we're designed to interact face to face," he said.

Blandin is distributing much of the stimulus grant in 11 towns around Minnesota, and the projects, all of which bubbled up from people in those communities, run a gamut. There's a lot of interest in buying computers and setting up centers in libraries, community centers and even an American Legion post in Morris that will give Internet access to those who don't have it.

But other projects are going to put historical records online, make public housing information available, provide streaming video access to public meetings, let patients interact with their clinics to schedule appointments and offer computer training classes.

Interestingly, in some cases the money is going for services that in another time local tax dollars would have paid for. Libraries, for example, are turning into the job centers for some communities, the contact point for unemployment services, says Michael Haynes, economic development coordinator for Stevens County.

"Governments can no longer afford to do some of those fundamental things and still provide the police and firefighters," he said. For example, because of the presence of the University of Minnesota, there's lots of rental housing in Morris, and one of the projects puts the city's rental housing information online.

All the community projects are aimed at creating a "culture of use," says Bill Coleman, whose Community Technology Advisors serves as a consultant coordinating much of the work for Blandin. As more people see value in greater Internet access, the thinking goes, the easier it will be to expand that access.

The money isn't huge for specific projects -- $11,000 for the speech therapy project, for example, or $2,500 to get Stevens County public housing applications online.

The projects won't necessarily generate a lot of jobs by themselves, but Coleman says Minnesota has not seen anything comparable in terms of creating a demand for connection that ultimately will benefit rural parts of the state economically.

"This is definitely something that hasn't been done before," he says.

In a speech today, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said one-third of Americans are not online. In Singapore the figure is 10 percent, he said.

The special ed kids in western Minnesota are a tiny part of trying to fix that.

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