By Donald Clark. Data, in the wrong hands, whether malicious, manipulative or naïve can be downright dangerous. Indeed, when big data goes bad it can be lethal. Unfortunately the learning game is no stranger to both the abuse of data. Here’s six examples showing seven species of ‘bad data’.
1. Data subtraction  
Don’t let the selective graphical representation of data, destroy the integrity of the data. A good example of blatant data editing is the memorable ‘ritalin’ image used by Sir Ken Robinson in his TED talk at 3.47. More...

By Tom Simonite. The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.
Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores. More...

La Commission européenne lance le programme «Ouvrir l'éducation» pour stimuler l’innovation et les compétences numériques dans les écoles et les universités
Plus de 60 % des enfants de neuf ans de l’Union européenne fréquentent des écoles qui ne sont pas encore équipées de matériel informatique performant. La Commission a présenté aujourd’hui le programme «Ouvrir l’éducation», un plan d’action visant à combler cette lacune technologique, parmi d'autres, qui empêche les écoles et universités de dispenser un enseignement de qualité élevée et d'enseigner les compétences numériques qui seront exigées dans 90 % des emplois d’ici à 2020. Pour contribuer au lancement de cette initiative, la Commission ouvre aujourd'hui un nouveau site web, Open Education Europa, qui permettra aux étudiants, aux professionnels de l'éducation et aux établissements d'enseignement de partager gratuitement des ressources éducatives libres.
Télécharger CP_Education-numérique.

By George Williams. Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written a great deal about WordPress, and we’ve also tried to emphasize the importance of accessibility, the need to make digital (and other) environments as usable as possible to the widest range of people possible. In a combination of these two topics, a couple of weeks ago, I drew your attention to the handy-dandy WordPress Accessibility Plugin, an almost-all-in-one tool for making your WordPress installs more accessible. More...