*January 15, 1929: In the Sweet Auburn community of Atlanta, GA, at 501 Auburn Ave, the second child of Rev. Martin L. King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King made his way into this life. The world would come to know him as Martin L. King, Jr, the Nobel Prize winning Drum Major for Peace.

It is well documented that MLK packed high achievements into his short 39 years. Even so, there is so much that is not known and appreciated about his mind, his work and his life. This lapse indeed represents a significant social loss. To know the deeper depths, and finer points, of King’s social philosophy and the challenges he faced is an education in and of itself. It is one that may go a long way, in helping to cultivate an ongoing public conversation about collective values and their inherent call to civic engagement and activism if necessary.

King In An Instagram World

One of the most difficult-yet critical- of all human endeavors, is the baton passing from one generation to the next; of beacons holding the greatest capacity for lighting the way forward. Part of this social. Part of this is technical. Each generation does not always see through the glass in the same way. Tastes can change. Sensitivities can shift. Virtues can be rewritten.

Atop of that, though it’s not always obvious, mediums and interfaces can change; limiting access to facts, accounts, lessons and insights. How much information is trapped in the tombs of crumpling paper, or microfilm, reel-to-reel tape or VHS? Unsearchable. Unknowable.

Though our age has put the fossil-medium conundrum behind, hurdles of our own still exist. We have an unified medium (the Internet), and it may produced zettabytes of data, but that in and of itself represents an accessible and unfathomable forest. One result is that varying demographic groups encamp in particular sub-divisions of this cyberverse. One population in Facebook. Another in Twitter. Yet another in Instagram. One in Drudge and Fox Land.

Another in Guardian and Viceville. Each with clear preferences and distinct methods for consuming information. When there is something of common importance to all of these, how does one go about reaching the whole? 120 characters? Photo or video clips? Live stream?

Expressed another way: how can we speak, substantively, of Martin L. King, Jr. to all?

Questions And Voice..

Achieving the complex can often require leveraging the simple.

Case in point: questions engage and hook the mind. Period. This is reflected in the age old popularity of trivia, in its various forms: Jeopardy, HQ Trivia, Trivia Night events. Questions create opportunities for learning. When that process is gamified, the learning all the better; driven by an opportunity compete, to shine, to win.

Next point: voice is the easiest interface. In times past, the primitive level of our computer technology framed how we interacted with them and the power they represent. Very few will remember punch cards, but in fact they were the method for expressing commands to computer systems. A big step forward was the arrival of simple command line entry. Then the wondrous mouse and Graphic User Interface (GUI): “click the icon on the screen”. The next plateau on the horizon is the Voice User Interface. No need to move a finger, just speak.

Yes, Alexa, Cortana, Google Home and Siri represent the first born of this era.

When you think about it, it makes sense. A voice web requires no screen and frees you up from having to focus on a keyboard. “Just speak.” Now let’s connect our two points together and we get Voice Trivia. An ability to hear questions spoken and speak your answers in return, a form of conversational learning if you will. So, interesting and compelling questions about the mind, work and life of MLK gamified, as a means to cultivating interest in his importance then and now. The latest in technology meets an age old human proclivity.

And The Hive

The arrival of the voice web does not remove the human mind from the heart of the trivia enterprise. (At least not yet.) Though it is now easier to create and play subject trivia, the heavy lift of creating the questions still rest on human shoulders. For now. The power of the collective homo sapien intellect, the Swarm, the Hive, yet reigns.

Which brings us finally to what we’re up to.

In honor of 90 years since Dr. King’s birth, we want to compile 90 of the most magnetic questions and answer sets about him. Points of engagement that will show us how little we may really know, about one of the most iconic lives of the 20th century and the movement that it helped to catalyze.

Here’s a quick sample (No cheating by looking on the web, or asking Google Home):

<> What was the first book Dr. King authored?

<> What was the last book that he authored?

<> How many books in total did he, himself pen?

Ah, you’ve caught a taste of it. Is your mind hooked? Do you not only want to know the answers (if you already didn’t), but did other questions rush to mind on their own?

We need you to in The Hive. That simply means you will:

1. research and craft (with proper citation- web URLs are fine) 1-3 question and answer sets on the mind, work and life of Dr. Martin L. King,
2. you will submit the question(s) to us via What’s App (1,000 Words: 312-982-9779)
3. you will recruit one to three other persons, to the same as you have done

As We Lift

The light of what is best among us shines, to the degree that we amplify it by lifting up. We can do this in creative and engaging ways, such as MLK Voice Trivia.

Respond to Rafiki Cai: rafikicai@gmail.com

Source Link: https://www.eurweb.com/2019/01/1000-words-mlk-jr-would-be-90-years-old-segment-3/