[Moodle] Ultranet - Moodle in Victorian Government Schools

[Henry Johnson]

Very disturbing videos. Who is "Us"? Doesn't seem to be the teachers and students in Victoria! But they do summarize nicely what we as a learning community should be able to provide. And some schools already do.

When I used to work in the IT industry, I was doing some work for a small accounting company in the States that wanted to implement Oracle Financials. The management was mesmerized and gave lots of money to Oracle. As I was the poor bunny hired to implement this solution (their original IT person resigned because he was not included in the discussions!) I was told by Oracle support that they would not deal with me until I was "trained" in the mysteries of Oracle.  And the training ain't cheap.  So off I went. Basically they told me to throw away the documentation that came with the software and provided me with a "proper" manual. While hanging out at the Oracle training centre I overheard of couple of sales guys boasting about how they convinced small companies to adopt Oracle solutions and then failed to implement them properly (ran out of money for training and consultants?), and as a result either went bankrupt or almost so. Didn't worry the sales guys, they had got their commission!!

Of course that was years ago. I am sure Oracle is now a caring, sharing company  eager to contribute to the well being of our Victorian educational system, even if it means a loss of some profits. And guess what? Even Oracle is offering some vaguely open source solutions nowadays. And what is it that Oracle can do that MySQL or PostGreSQL can't? I sure they have any number of spin doctors on six figure salaries to help you find out the "facts".

And Ultranet? I still have no idea what it is. I've seen a whole lot of PR, but no specifics about software, performance, etc. I guess that'll will all be taken care of once the Vic government hands over the cash. Much easier to find out how WikiPedia or Google runs than it is to find out about Ultranet. And they are sort of like an Ultranet aren't they? And what about setting up Moodle clusters? Our Moodle server integrates seamlessly with our Novell eDirectory service and why not share resources with other schools? I'd love to do a feasibility study. I'd only charge $100K.


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Henry Johnson
Moodle Administrator
Yavneh College
http://moodle.yavneh.vic.edu.au
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>>> aheyde at eimatech.com 08/19/07 6:49 PM >>>
Hi Everyone!

I met Donna at the Education Show and am very interested in the
Ultranet project.

Just out of interest:

How many Victorian government schools currently use Moodle?

Have you seen all these videos?
feed://homepage.mac.com/torres21/page6/files/page6.xml

What is the point in putting in a tender when Oracle has basically
done all the research and built a fair bit of the system already? Am I
missing something?
Or is this whole tender thing "just because the government has to put
everything to tender"?
Haven't the government already *chosen* Oracle?

Thanks

Amiel
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