fikr 6: things that made me...

...think (or remember)

John Davies, Vice President, Sales and Marketing Group, and General Manager, World Ahead, Intel Corporation:

Intel's World Ahead Program ran a project in a village outside Cairo. They were told when they first went there that fixing the basic infrastructure (such as the sewers) was more important than installing technology. Intel established a WiMAX umbrella in the village and put some computers in the local hospital; when they visited four months later they found that four schools had connected themselves to the internet, and that the pupils had worked together to come up with official proposals to be submitted for building pedestrian bridges, cleaning up rubbish dumps, and analysing crops. They had used the technology to become more self-sufficient, and to solve the problems in their own way.

Dr Mona Mourshed, a partner with McKinsey & Company, based in the UAE:

In Finland you need to be in the top ten percent of graduates to become a teacher. In South Korea you need to be in the top five percent, in Singapore and Hong Kong the top thirty percent. In the Arab world teachers tend to be recruited from the bottom twenty percent of graduates, who have no other option.

Twenty-first century skills – flexibility, adaptability – need to be encouraged from pre-school. There is no point focusing on universities if nothing is changing at the youngest age. You cannot fix early problems later. Failure is cumulative.

(For more, see a recent report that Dr Mona Mourshed co-authored: How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top)

John Clippinger, Senior Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School:

There is certainly a 'fatigue of the new', but we can't avoid it. There has been more new knowledge in the last ten years than in the previous two thousand years, and we all need to learn how to manage that volume and to work out what is trustworthy.

Cory Ondrejka, Chief Technology Officer, Linden Lab (creators of Second Life):

Despite the range of information on the information on the internet, it is possible to stay in a giant echo chamber and hear just what you want to hear.

...despair

Ashraf Ghani, Former Minister of Finance, Afghanistan, member of the UN High-Level Panel on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, once tipped to be UN Secretary-General, as well as to be president of the World Bank:

The problems in the Middle East began with the division into separate nations and the importing of Western-style nationalism; the region should stop operating on foreign models and look at the Abbasid period as an example of self-confident government.

...giggle

During the Crown Prince's speech I switched on my Bluetooth – and the first name that came up was (صاحب السمو).