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james kilty wrote: > On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 10:50 +0000, Tom Potts wrote: > >> We had thousands of >> 'Management Consultants' giving courses and advice on management methods. >> They were all American, over here because their 'skills' had been tried and >> found seriously wanting in the States. >> > And how may times and at what expense has the NHS been reorganised using > management consultants? > > I think if we can offer support and advice, even training, we might be > able to drip feed our points about the benefit to schools and pupils. > County Councils and schools - perhaps as parents (or grand parents) > certainly as school governors. > > I agree, lets just do it, (see below) I am more than keen to get involved with this. > I will have another go at my daughter's school - alas my days as > governor are long over. Ayt least I can offer an imput to year 11 and > see how well it goes down. > The latest buzz word in schools is "learning platforms" essentially online learning so the students can continue at home, and submit work and collaborate with classmates while at hone on projects. The leading platform for this is moodle, there are offerings by companies such as RM (yeah I know) but its closed source etc, moodle however is the most used world wide, is available to everyone. There was an article on the site a while back or linked from the site that looked at both commercial and the oss offerings, not sure where it is, a hard copy is at work in the staff room. Anyway I printed this off and its currently in the school staff room suffice to say if we are to offer such services to schools they must be affordable to the school as no extra money is in the budget for this be a complete package, we need to approach schools sell moodle by its strength, and world wide usage. ask what happens if you goto suppplier X, you get staff trained up, that person leaves, to replace with a person with package X skills you are going to end up paying more go with moodle and there is a much larger pool of staff to potentially fill that gap in staffing, a complete package may be, for one school hosting, cost per month low, initial set up, training, tech support, etc etc, all need to be offered. I I think as a lug we need to actually get together, and perhaps set something up, there are people here with all the required skills to setup a business, and there are people like looking for work / training and want to get involved, I alone could probably get moodle up and running on debian. apt-get install moodle. but it needs someone who knows and understand education to get the most from it. we can offer a package to local schools but all work together on this one, perhaps set up a devon and cornwall moodle mailing list, which can also be used by schools to find staff, etc. Its possible, i just have no idea regarding how to set up a business for this type of things, but the opportunity is there we just need to grab it before someone like RM get in there and charge what ever they charge per month for hosting, get moodle in to schools show how good OSS is, and its a stepping stone to other OSS software in schools. and we are there to help support it, Paul -- Support open file formats use ISO 26300 Open Document format as used by openoffice.org, http:///www.openoffice.org visit us on IRC - irc.flashtek-uk.com / 6667 #dclug -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version 3.1 GIT d S: a C+++ UL++++ P+ L++ W++ N+ W--- O! V! PS+ Y! t+++ 5 X+++ R tv- b- DI! D++ G e H! r! z? -----END GEEK CODE BLOCK---- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html