Now that we’ve received official word that our broadband stimulus grant will be awarded, project staff Bill Coleman, Jack Geller, Ann Treacy and I have moved out of cautious hold-your-breath mode into active project launch preparations with a series of ‘courtesy calls’ with our new project partners.
Our visits have been very energizing – and have surfaced a few surprises. In many ways we will get the greatest value from the surprises; an early start will help turn surprises into opportunities, not issues.
On Monday we met with University of Minnesota Extension Service, Association of Minnesota Counties and the Minnesota Learning Commons.
University of Minnesota Extension Service
We started the day in Coffey Hall on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul Campus meeting Joyce Hoelting and Dick Senese from the Extension Service’s Community Vitality and Public Engagement Program. Extension’s mission is to connect community needs and University resources, and they have a long history of working in agriculture, wellness, leadership capacity development and decision support, and more recently, helping communities use technology. Many readers will be familiar with their Access.E curriculum. Through MIRC, Extension Services with be able to update and develop training and technical assistance to more businesses.
Using technology to revitalize community: Making a difference by connecting community needs and University resources to address critical issues in Minnesota.
Dick and Joyce and their team bring to the project deep knowledge of community capacity building and extensive-on-the-ground technical experience. Joyce and I met through the Humphrey Institute’s MPA program, and she introduced me to Dick shortly after she went to work for him at Extension. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to work more closely with Extension ever since, and now we have that chance in spades. Dick and Joyce both had some good ideas about organization and information management tools that could help keep all 19 project partners well informed about what’s happening with everyone and across the entire project.
It was also interesting to hear about Extension Service’s new “Roadside Advertising in the Digital Age” GPS workshops. The training is based on the premise that more and more, travelers are using GPS systems such as Magellan to learn about the areas where they are visiting and vacationing. So it makes at least as much sense to make use of advertising on those online maps as it does to invest in traditional billboards. I don’t have a GPS locator yet, but I’ve driven with plenty of folks who do – Bill for example. I’m glad our demonstration communities will have a chance to learn more.
Association of Minnesota Counties
Next we headed over to downtown St Paul to meet Anne Olson, Director of MN Workforce Council Association and Laurie Klupacs, Membership Services Manager at the Association of Minnesota Counties. AMC is a voluntary association of counties – although all of Minnesota’s 87 counties are currently members. AMC represents their members to state government, striving to get the counties what they need; they also provide educational programs, training, research and communications for county officials.
Our conversation focused on healthcare needs – well technology-related health care needs — and it is clear that the counties could use some help. The lingering economic downturn continues to hit many rural people hard, and the state budget deficit is cutting into local government aid that counties have previously relied on. Technology planning, vision, capacity and support in each county is uneven. Some have highly performing, interactive web sites, other counties’ internet sites are static, some have nothing. Electronic health records need to be online by 2015, but there is little to no funding to make that transition. County social services are responsible for administering many different programs, but more often than not program data bases are not integrated, with few resources in sight to improve, rationalize, or update systems. It will be exciting to see how the MIRC project can help AMC help local counties extend and improve the delivery of mental health care online.
Minnesota Learning Commons
We finished out our first day of meetings with Gary Langer and Jerry Johnson at the Minnesota Learning Commons. The Learning Commons is both a clearinghouse of online curriculum (for kindergarten through college and beyond) and a pathway to help learners create an educational plan to meet their needs, whether you’re an exceptional first grader or returning vet interested in new skills. The clearing house includes curriculum for instructor-led classes to support teachers and classroom materials for students and parents. We hope MIRC can help raise awareness and use of this free and innovative resource for all Minnesotans; life-long learning is a core value of the Blandin Foundation.
The Minnesota Learning Commons will be creating new curriculum for MIRC to help workers learn more about career paths and options in the new information economy. Our shorthand for the new curriculum so far is: “knowledge worker course.” By that we mean a class that will introduce folks to the many new jobs and careers that are growing along with the new information economy, and the pathways to those jobs. The class will be online, but instructor-led, so that students have the support they need on-site to help them. Learning will happen on many levels: students will learn about knowledge worker career opportunities, they’ll learn how to better use technology, and they will have learned how to take an online course, which should open the door to greater learning.
So far a great group is emerging.
