There’s also a mobile version for smartphones! And don’t forget the Twitter link, where I also post links and commentary that don’t get featured in the blog.

Business
The Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship celebrate the work of business owners. The competition is open until August 24th, and the winner will be declared during a Gala in Nairobi on December 8th.

Arts
African Digital Art is an amazing online platform showcasing the work of visual artists, designers, filmmakers and more throughout Africa. Its weekly inspiration post is a delight!

What’s Up Africa, a video blog about “what’s hip, hot, eye-catching.”

Just as personality, creativity is difficult to assess. Torrance’s test, a 90-minute series of tasks, is widely considered to be the best measurement of creativity. We’re not talking about creating art here, but rather of being capable of coming up with original answers, solve problems, innovate, synthesize ideas into positive outcomes, etc.

Whereas IQ test results steadily increase over the years – by 10 points for each generation – the creativity quotient, or CQ, has been falling for the first time.

You might already see where this is going. Individuals who obtain high scores on the Torrance test grow up to become entrepreneurs, engineers, professors… In other words, some of the most influential people out there. And with a bunch of major issues to solve – health care, transportation, war, our water system to mention a few, the qualities of creative people are in high demand. In fact, there’s a whole new professional field that seeks to explore these qualities, that’s design thinking.

The Newsweek article cites two possible causes to the decline of creativity: the time spent by kids in front of the television or playing video games, and our education system. It’s only analyzing the U.S. system, but I feel this could be useful for a bunch of countries. The question is: what skills do we want to teach children? And what are the skills they will need most in the future? We don’t need to radically change curricula in order to have kids develop their creativity. Again, this is not about having more art classes. For instance, problem-solving can be reinforced as part of regular Mathematics or History classes. Encouraging creativity is encouraging kids to ask questions, see issues from different angles, think “outside the box” (no matter how much I hate this expression.)

“Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood,” concludes the author. America has always thrived on being populated with creative, entrepreneurial, adventurous people. What if it loses that part of itself?

Read the full Newsweek article here.

Photo credits: Flickr user tifotter.

I don’t think that we have ever experienced, at least in American history, a transformation of political opinion like the one we’ve seen in the past several years on the environment and climate. Young people understand that the world we’re talking about is the world they’re going to raise their kids in, that this isn’t a distant reality, that the ice caps are melting now. While that gives me hope, the gap of understanding between those people and the 70-year-olds who are in the U.S. Senate is staggering. It’s a generation gap that makes everything the boomers talked about in the 1960s look like a disagreement at a tea party.

This is an excerpt from an essay written by Alex Steffen, executive editor of Worldchanging.com and editor of the book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, that was published in the January/February edition of Good magazine.

As a twentysomething student, I’ve often felt frustrated by some of my teachers’ inability to use new technology, by my parents’ lack of optimism, by the fact that politicians take decisions in matters in which they have no experience. The world is moving and changing really fast, and instead of taking decisions based on what happened in the past decades, maybe we should start thinking about what will happen tomorrow. I was amazed to learn that the White House restrict the number of emails sent by the President for security reasons. Many judges, who sometimes have to rule on matters that will set a precedence, have never used the Internet. How does this reflect our society? What does it say about the generation gap? Politicians and decisionmakers have to remember to listen to citizens and we have the responsibility to remind them to do so.

Read the whole article here.