Folks who attended the Blandin Broadband conference last fall will recognize the term and the idea of culture of use; it was the theme of the conference – selected because it’s been a major theme throughout much of the work at the Blandin Foundation these days.

Yesterday Dave Peters helped MPR Ground Level readers understand how Blandin is promoting a culture of use through the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities (MIRC) initiative by highlighting a handful of MIRC programs.

Last month in a blog post, Bernadine Joselyn spoke about the MIRC project. We are at a point where money is being handed off to support small projects in the 11 demonstration communities. As Dave points out the funded for any one project is not large – but it is focused on projects that folks on the ground and community leaders agree will make a difference.

Here is one of the projects he describes…

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.

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.