Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (303 mails)

[Colin McQueen <cmcqueen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi

"ICT Support Officer" <ict@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> My original post about how taxpayers' money is wasted brought about a
> good response and I am so pleased. There has been so many of you with
> strong hearts and most of all strong voice except for a minor few.
> 
> I would also like to mention LEA and their inefficiency providing
> support to schools in terms of so called ICT. No doubt many of you are
> aware that National grid for learning has been brought about and we
> seem to have some compulsory broadband connections forced upon us. So
> far I found the system unworkable because there are private companies
> involved. For example I wanted to run the school web server from
> school but the ISP will not provide a public IP address for the
> school. They also seem reluctant to re-root requests through their DNS
> to the private IP range they allocated for us in order to access
> school servers on any port. I proposed to my school management but LEA
> IT department gave us a bashful

Our LEA gives us ports etc.  It took time for them to trust us and I
suspect for them to understand they could.  I suspect they were locking
down because they didn't know fully what they were doing and then slowly
lifted the lid as they became more experienced.  Sensible strategy it
seems to me.

> 
> I could go on but my point here is that it is not just Open Source
> software issue but other services too. Again we pay thousands of
> pounds for these services but we do not get back all the services we
> want. !!!Wasting the tax payers money issue here again!!!!

But there just is NOT the expertise in schools or at LEAs to handle open
source.  It may come but its not there yet.  

I really think a touch of pragmatism is needed here.


-- 
Colin McQueen