I'm very pleased to find out today that there is a petition against the hopeless software that increasing numbers of Dutch schools use to show students their results and to keep parents in touch with what the students are doing.
The Magister website is really very simple and could have been implemented entirely with open standards software, in which case it would simply have worked for everyone. However, someone made the rather stupid decision to use Microsoft's Silverlight, and as a result it simply doesn't work on any of our computers, or those of thousands of other parents. Even if you run Windows there is no guarantee that this thing will work because its dependent on particular versions of software which you may not have, and will probably require an expensive upgrade to access information which should be free to all. This has caused us any amount of grief.
It is high time that websites like this which all parents and students are supposed to have equal access to, actually did give all parents and students equal access.
More information here:
http://www.janstedehouder.nl/2011/09/28/make-the-use-of-open-standards-in-education-mandatory/
And on Slashdot:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/01/0013203/battle-for-open-standards-in-dutch-public-education
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