I recently came across yet another great talk from Sir Ken Robinson on the education system. In his talk, Ken discusses the standardisation of education and the fact that something designed to be used during the industrial revolution may no longer be relevant for today’s youth. If anything, the system serves only to quash creativity and anaesthetise.

In his talk, Ken talks about the importance of Divergent Thinking – which is basically an essential capacity for creativity, the ability to see lots of answers to a question, lots of possible ways to interpret a question, to think laterally.

I am wondering whether this might perhaps shed some light on why NGOs are so reluctant when it comes to innovation – Perhaps we need to be increasing our efforts to promote divergent thinking within social organisations!

(Many thanks to Mariana Rios from Gire for sending us this video!)

Our predictions here at Marceloiniarra.com were spot on! The Smartphone is now the personal computer of choice.

Recent announcements made by market intelligence firm, IDC today, reveal that Smartphone manufacturers shipped over 109 million devices in the last quarter of 2010 alone, bringing the total number of devices sold during 2010 to 302.6 million – a 74.4% increase from 2009.

For all of us, including the social sector, these figures spell massive changes in the way we communicate and interact with one another.

According to Ramon Llamas, Senior Research Analyst with IDC’s Mobile phone technology and trends team, “Android especially, continues to gain by leaps and bounds, helping to drive the smartphone market.”

The main reason behind Android’s popularity is its open-source Linux operating system which allows for increasingly more novel apps. This is particularly relevant for the social sector as it enables developers from all over the world to create relevant apps without any boundaries or regulations imposed by more controlled operating systems such as Apple and Windows.