Open Source Schools

[Miles Berry]

After feedback from its own community, Becta and a number of us on
this list, the AlphaPlus team behind opensourceschools.org.uk invited
me to take over the website, so guess how I've spent most of my
Christmas holidays!

The idea now is to make it much easier for anyone to create content
for the site, to reflect the community driven aims of the project.
There's a blog-like front page, which I'm hoping the community there
will regularly create content for, and I've streamlines the original
forum areas. I've also brought in a few aggregated news feeds, worked
on the navigation and set up email notifications. All feedback
gratefully recieved.

I'm hopeful that the community there will now be able to get off the
ground, and I do hope folk here will give opensourceschools another
chance, and come and share some of your experiences and opinions.

Drupal, I must say, is brilliant. At times frustrating, but that's
half the fun. I continue to be amazed at how effective the drupal.org
community has been at providing fixes and coming up with some really
cool modules.

Best wishes,
Miles.

Miles Berry
Head, Alton Convent Prep, http://www.altonconvent.org.uk/prep
Web manager, http://opensourceschools.org.uk
http://milesberry.net

[Richard Rothwell]

2009/1/12 Miles Berry <mgb...@gmail.com>:

>
> After feedback from its own community, Becta and a number of us on
> this list, the AlphaPlus team behind opensourceschools.org.uk invited
> me to take over the website, so guess how I've spent most of my
> Christmas holidays!
>
> The idea now is to make it much easier for anyone to create content
> for the site, to reflect the community driven aims of the project.
> There's a blog-like front page, which I'm hoping the community there
> will regularly create content for, and I've streamlines the original
> forum areas. I've also brought in a few aggregated news feeds, worked
> on the navigation and set up email notifications. All feedback
> gratefully recieved.
>
> I'm hopeful that the community there will now be able to get off the
> ground, and I do hope folk here will give opensourceschools another
> chance, and come and share some of your experiences and opinions.
>
> Drupal, I must say, is brilliant. At times frustrating, but that's
> half the fun. I continue to be amazed at how effective the drupal.org
> community has been at providing fixes and coming up with some really
> cool modules.
>
> Best wishes,
> Miles.

Nice job Miles, much cleaner than the previous attempt. I hope they
paid you for it as they are being paid a £1/4 million for this
project.

Will look into the forums, but am still not holding my breath...

rgds,
Richard
----

Richard Rothwell, rich...@m6-it.org
Education Consultant http://m6-it.org

Web services * Back-ups * Support * Training & Certification * E-Mail
M6-IT CIC ``Software Freedom for the Education and Voluntary Sector''

M6-IT is a Community Interest Company, limited by guarantee
Registered in England & Wales, Registration No: 6040154
11 St Marks Road, Stourbridge, West Midlands, DY9 7DT

[Peter Robinson]

Who knows how well the forums will work?

However some seeding is being done at this moment, and we hope to see
a few items going up over the next few days.

Richard, outside this group, you suggested you post something along
these lines:

I've been spending a lot of time looking at the Edexcel A-level
Applied ICT syllabus. The exemplar materials are all clearly produced
using one brand of proprietary software, would it be worth requiring
the boards to demonstrate alternatives?

Would you mind posting it now, as the forum notifications should now
be up and running.

All the best

Peter Robinson

[garry]

Just to clarify things, can anyone tell me what has happened to the
money and what is AlphaPlus now doing? Has the contract been withrawn?

[Ian Lynch]

On Jan 12, 2:50 pm, garry <ga...@scholarpack.org> wrote:
> Just to clarify things, can anyone tell me what has happened to the
> money and what is AlphaPlus now doing? Has the contract been withrawn?

Why would the contract be withdrawn? Alphaplus have set up a web site
which was the basic initial strategy. As long as they don't do
anything drastically illegal or something BECTA will not withdraw the
contract since they have to be given reasonable time to hit the first
year targets. Seems to me that with a one or two year contract with
what is a minute amount of money on the national contracts scale of
things even if none of the targets were achieved this contract would
be just let to run its course. Of course that might affect APs chances
of winning future contracts but probably if they don't cause BECTA
hassle even that is unlikely. If the project doesn't deliver, BECTA
will most likely just say to the DCFS we tried but it didn't work.
Depends on the overall political climate whether anything further
would be tried. Don't forget we think FOSS is a lot more important
than either BECTA or the DCFS. Their attitude will change if a) It
looks like it might affect election results b) They start to look
really stupid when third world countries take all the jobs in IT off
us. If the project is seen to be successful they will say the take up
of FOSS in schools was entirely down to them and isn't the government
and BECTA wonderful. If its a failure it will be quietly ignored. This
is politics, read a bit about Machiavelli. No smoke without fire :-)