Who will use the ClicSite?
- A young mother online with Health and Wellness, researching lazy eye syndrome. Her daughter was just diagnosed.
- A self-directed student. She’s taking nursing online from Athabasca University, or agricultural marketing from Olds College, or training to be a pharmacy technician with Red Deer College.
- A group of business people taking part in a seminar about accessing foreign markets, delivered live by The Business Link through room-based videoconferencing.
- An adult worker retraining for a trade by taking first year electrical apprenticeship from NAIT DATE via videoconferencing. He can keep his regular job and live at home with his wife and kids while he’s taking the course.
- An entrepreneur needs help developing a business plan. She’s meeting with a business analyst from Community Futures Wild Rose.
- A young father videoconferencing with his parenting peer support group, a group of men from very small communities scattered across the province.
- An agricultural producer desktop videoconferencing with a business management specialist at the Alberta Ag-Info Centre in Stettler. The producer has questions about niche crops for bio-fuels. He and the specialist are sharing maps of soil conditions on their desktops.
- A senior couple applying for a grant to fix the foundation of their home. Connected by videoconferencing, they can see (and therefore hear more clearly) the government information officer as they review the grant guidelines together. They’re using a desktop interactive SMART board to fill out the grant application with the officer in real-time.
The VLBC ClicSite Project: What’s it about and who’s in it?
Tomorrow’s Promise Today will create Virtual Learning and Business Centres - ClicSites - in the Three Hills Municipal Library and the Hanna Learning Centre.
A joint venture of the Town of Three Hills, the Hanna Learning Centre and the Three Hills Library Board, these centres will give residents in east-central Alberta better access to and expanded value from Alberta’s SuperNet.
A number of new programs will be implemented and evaluated during the next three years including a business incubator, web portal and community e-index, videoconferencing, on-line learning using a multi-college model, a P3 partnership providing wireless Internet and other services to small towns and villages, and innovative new models for rural library operations and multi-organizational cooperation.
Three Hills and Hanna will be the first anchor points in establishing a SuperNet-enabled network of knowledge centres using broadband intensive applications expanding across rural Alberta.
This network creates a non-inhibiting, easily accessible marketplace or a mall offering consumers the largest selection of services from the greatest number of providers who deal with every aspect of community life. Each provider has a physical or virtual presence in the ClicSite, and together they become a new focal point for the shared life of the community.
The providers will work in collaboration to cross-promote, cross-refer, link programs and share resources in serving all populations in the community to best effect. By enlarging the capacity and confidence of individuals, then connecting them to each other and the community through the ClicSite, we build community capacity through community engagement.
This is 21st century public infrastructure and technology serving a 21st century rural Alberta that operates on an equal footing with anyone and anywhere else in the world.
Why is the SuperNet important to rural Alberta?
Best-selling author Thomas Friedman makes the case in his book The World is Flat that three converging forces have combined to “flatten” the world: the popularity of the personal computer and the growth of the Internet; increasingly abundant broadband connectivity; and standardized computer software that provides a common set of tools for sharing work.
In this new flat world, barriers imposed by distance and time are erased. Information, goods and services can be produced or sourced from around the world more quickly, simply and inexpensively through the ability of individuals, organizations and corporations to connect and collaborate digitally in ways not possible before.
Because of the aggregate of its features - its reach, capacity and scalability - the Alberta SuperNet has no peer broadband network anywhere else in the world. If broadband connectivity is one key to unlocking unparalleled opportunity - especially in the knowledge economies - then rural Albertans are perfectly positioned because of the SuperNet to take advantage of this profound change in the way the global marketplace of ideas and commodities operates.
One of the principal immediate benefits of the SuperNet is affordable access to high-speed Internet service province-wide. But this uses only a fraction of the capacity of the SuperNet. The full value of the SuperNet will be realized when truly broadband-intensive services are made readily available everywhere in Alberta.
Challenge and Opportunity
To help make that possible, the VLBC ClicSite initiative deals with this question:
How will the Alberta SuperNet bring widespread advantage of a kind not previously available or otherwise possible to obtain, to rural Albertans, right away, that they can use every day?
Strategies
The ClicSite will use innovative practice and leading technology to act on these four strategies:
Strategy 1
Introduce the prototype of a network of local knowledge centres that rural Albertans can use every day, featuring broadcast quality videoconferencing and other broadband collaborative tools,that allow individuals at scattered points separated by distance to engage in the personal, rich human experience of fully interactive, face to face, real time communication.
Strategy 2
Operate as a single local point of entry to:
- All online information in the public and private sectors.
- “Next level” online learning in rural Alberta that models a new collaborative campus approach with education providers from around the province.
Strategy 3
Model a new working relationship between Alberta’s Public Libraries and Community Adult Learning Councils, and many other organizations, in making the VLBC a hub of activity in the community for sharing space, technology and other resources for the most effective, efficient and cost-effective delivery of certain services and programs to rural Albertans.
Strategy 4
Model a wireless solution for bridging the “first mile” between the SuperNet and every household and business in rural Alberta through a P3 partnership that opens rural markets for private sector ISPs.
What are some of the anticipated outcomes of the VLBC ClicSite Project?
- Foster vibrant learning communities by giving greater access to a wider range of highest quality educational opportunities with strong local supports to students.
- Extend the reach of present public and private sector resources and services to a wider geographic area and larger client population.
- Add skilled workers to Alberta’s workforce.
- Add value to goods and services produced in traditional economies.
- Incubate e-businesses and equip people to compete effectively in the global knowledge economy.
- Develop e-communities that have the ICT infrastructure needed to support a knowledge workforce and e-commerce, e-learning, e-government.
- Strengthen volunteer sector organizations by giving them ways to accomplish more by working together than they can by working alone.
- Reverse the drift of businesses, business and healthcare professionals, and young people from rural to urban centres. These are key segments of the critical core capacity a community must have to grow and prosper.
