The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

The King Institute

Clayborne Carson with King Center President Coretta Scott King, during her November 1986 visit to Stanford
 

Margo Davis

In 2005, with an initial $1 million endowment pledge from Hall of Fame football star Ronnie Lott and his All Stars Helping Kids organization, Dr. Clayborne Carson founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute to provide a permanent financial base for the King Papers Project and a broad range of other educational activities. The Institute also received a substantial endowment gift from The Mumford Family/Agape Foundation. It is seeking additional endowment support to insure that its efforts to disseminate King's visionary ideas will continue in perpetuity. 

The King Institute's current programs include:

• Completion of the authoritive, multi-volume edition of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.; 
• Publication of other books intended for general and scholarly audiences;
• The Liberation Curriculum educational initiative, which produces curriculum materials and lesson plans as well as conducts teacher development workshops encouraging the use of the Papers Project's online documentary materials;
• Scholar/writer-in-residence programs for invited experts in King-related fields;
• King conferences and symposia as well as other public events designed to enhance understanding of peace and social justice issues.

King Resources

The King Institute provides access to thousands of documents, photographs and publications about the modern African American Freedom Struggle. Use this page to navigate to resources about King's life and work and the larger movements of the era.

King Encyclopedia

Visit the King Encyclopedia for information on over 1000 civil rights movement figures, events, and organizations. Additional resources include a freedom struggle chronology and featured documents.

Visit The King Encyclopedia

Primary Documents

View our selected primary source documents about the African American Freedom Struggle and search thousands of records at our Online King Records Access (OKRA) database.

View primary documents

Freedom's Ring: King's "I Have a Dream" Speech

Freedom's Ring is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, animated. Here you can compare the written and spoken speech, explore multimedia images, listen to movement activists and uncover historical context. 

Visit Freedom's Ring

Major King Events Chronology

The King Events Chronology focuses on the major events of Dr. King's life. Our volume chronologies provide a more detailed account of King's activities within each time period. 

View the Major King Events Chronology

Recommended Readings

In addition to our own volumes of the King Papers Project, here is a running list of additional books about Martin Luther King's life and work, and the black freedom struggle. 

View our recommended readings

Stanford Runs MOOC for Science Teachers on Helping Students Read

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 01/07/16

Next week a new massive open online course will begin for K-12 science teachers who want to learn how to help their students read and understand scientific texts. The course, delivered by Stanford University faculty, is free to participants. Four course sessions will run for 12 weeks and will deliver the equivalent of about 20 hours of professional development. The MOOC begins on January 13 and will be hosted on the NovoEd platform.

"Reading To Learn in Science" is being taught by Jonathan Osborne, a professor of science education in Stanford's Graduate School of Education. In a previous career, Osborne spent nine years teaching physics in inner city London schools.

During the course, Osborne will share teaching methods and the research behind them for helping students read and comprehend scientific texts. "The language of science is unique," the course description states. "It can be used to communicate rapidly enormous quantities of information with extraordinary specificity — and the same features which make it so useful also make it uniquely challenging to learn. You, as a science teacher, are uniquely well positioned to help your students comprehend the language of science texts."

Participants will "examine the selection of useful science texts; see specific strategies for supporting student comprehension before, during and after reading; learn how to recognize the unique challenges posed by science texts and how to help students overcome them; and acquire the skills to foster productive discussion around scientific ideas and texts."

The course also promises to help teachers apply their learning inside their own classrooms. The instructors will include the use of small groups to enable participants to collaborate offline in sharing ideas and resources.

Osborne's teaching assistant, Quentin Sedlacek, will also be an instructor for the course. Sedlacek, who helped develop the original online version of the course, said he sees big demand for professional development in this area. "A lot of science teachers know that their students struggle with reading and comprehending science texts, and they are out there looking for specific strategies they can use to help their kids, as well as real research that supports the use of those strategies. We're just helping people access those ideas and that research, in a form we hope will be useful for them."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business for a number of publications. Contact her at dian@dischaffhauser.com. 

Big Data online university courses

If you are interested in the growing career field of data science or have a general IT interest in what Big Data is and how it can be applied to real world topics then be sure to review the following MOOCs that discuss Big Data.

Tackling the Challenges of Big Data (October 6 - November 17, 2015) MITProfessionalX
(https://mitprofessionalx.mit.edu/courses/course-v1:MITProfessionalX+6.BDx+2015_T2/about)

This Digital Programs course will survey state-of-the-art topics in Big Data, looking at data collection (smartphones, sensors, the Web), data storage and processing (scalable relational databases, Hadoop, Spark, etc.), extracting structured data from unstructured data, systems issues (exploiting multicore, security), analytics (machine learning, data compression, efficient algorithms), visualization, and a range of applications.
Each module will introduce broad concepts as well as provide the most recent developments in research.
The course is taught by a team of world experts in each of these areas from MIT and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
CSAIL is the largest research laboratory at MIT and one of the world’s most important centers of information technology research. CSAIL and its members have played a key role in the computer revolution. The lab’s researchers have been key movers in developments like time-sharing, massively parallel computers, public key encryption, the mass commercialization of robots, and much of the technology underlying the ARPANet, Internet, and the World Wide Web.
CSAIL members (former and current) have launched more than 100 companies, including RSA Data Security, Akamai, iRobot, Meraki, ITA Software, and Vertica. The Lab is home to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
With backgrounds in data, programming, finance, multicore technology, database systems, robotics, transportation, hardware, and operating systems, each MIT Tackling the Challenges of Big Data professor brings their own unique experience and expertise to the course.


Big Data: Measuring and Predicting Human Behaviour
(https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/big-data)

Explore how the vast amounts of data generated today can help us understand and even predict how humans behave.

We increasingly rely on networked computer systems and smart cards to support our everyday activities, and everything we do generates data – whether buying bread at the supermarket, taking a ride on public transport, or calling a friend for a chat.
This data is opening up a new era for our understanding of human behaviour – and also for policy making and business processes which depend upon this understanding. Research has shown how data can give us insight into the risk of an upcoming stock market crash; decrease delays in measuring the spread of illness; or even allow us to predict where crimes might occur.
This course will help you understand and unlock the power of these new datasets. You will gain an overview of the state of the art in big data research across a range of domains, including economics, crime and health.
You will also acquire some basic practical skills for data science using, learning to write basic programs in R, create basic data visualisations and carry out simple analyses. By the end of the course, you will be able to find out and analyse what people have been looking for on Google and Wikipedia.


Mining Massive Datasets
(https://www.coursera.org/course/mmds)

This class from Stanford University teaches algorithms for extracting models and other information from very large amounts of data. The emphasis is on techniques that are efficient and that scale well.

We introduce the participant to modern distributed file systems and MapReduce, including what distinguishes good MapReduce algorithms from good algorithms in general.  The rest of the course is devoted to algorithms for extracting models and information from large datasets.  Participants will learn how Google's PageRank algorithm models importance of Web pages and some of the many extensions that have been used for a variety of purposes.  We'll cover locality-sensitive hashing, a bit of magic that allows you to find similar items in a set of items so large you cannot possibly compare each pair.  When data is stored as a very large, sparse matrix, dimensionality reduction is often a good way to model the data, but standard approaches do not scale well; we'll talk about efficient approaches.  Many other large-scale algorithms are covered as well, as outlined in the course syllabus.

There is a free book "Mining of Massive Datasets, by Leskovec, Rajaraman, and Ullman (who by coincidence are the instructors for this course :-).  You can download it at http://www.mmds.org/  Hardcopies can be purchased from Cambridge Univ. Press.

Big Data MOOC
(http://cloudu.rackspace.com/diweb/catalog/item/id/245249/q/c=130)

This course is intended for Students, IT Professionals, and Business Leaders who want a high-level understanding of big data, big data technology, and big data related careers.

This MOOC will teach you how to “talk the talk” in the big data world. In other words, if you are:

• Considering investing in a big data solution, this MOOC is for you
• Considering a career in big data, this MOOC is for you
• Often hearing terms like MapReduce, Hadoop, and petabytes and not sure what they are, this MOOC is for you
• A Big Data enthusiast who wants to see what CloudU put together, this MOOC is for you

Whatever the reason, we’re glad you’re here. Help us make this Big Data MOOC even better by participating in polls and discussions in the Discussion Center. We want to be clear that this MOOC will not certify you or qualify you to be a Big Data Architect or Data Scientist. This MOOC simply introduces you to the big data landscape, big data concepts, and big data terms you need to know to “talk the talk” in the big data world.

If you successfully pass the “Big Data MOOC Final Exam” in the third week, you get a CloudU Big Data MOOC certificate, a nice looking web badge, and a chance to win a CloudU t-shirt.

We titled this MOOC “Bigger is Better” because we’re confident you will not find more industry insights in one place than the CloudU Big Data MOOC.

What are you waiting for? Class is in session!


Digital Analytics Fundamentals
(https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course01)

This course from CloudU provides a foundation for marketers and analysts seeking to understand the core principles of digital analytics and to improve business performance through better digital measurement.

Course highlights include:

• An overview of today’s digital measurement landscape
• Guidance on how to build an effective measurement plan
• Best practices for collecting actionable data
• Descriptions of key digital measurement concepts, terminology and analysis techniques
• Deep-dives into Google Analytics reports with specific examples for evaluating your digital marketing performance

Big Data Masters Programs

If you are looking for a more formal Big Data educational opportunity then review the Top 20 Masters Programs specializing in Big Data.

Big Data Analytics Master's Degrees: 20 Top Programs

These one-year and two-year graduate programs are just what's needed to close the big-data talent gap. Read on to find a school that fits your ambitions and background.

1 of 22

Technology and Its Possibilities Are the Future

Madelyne Xiao, a student at Stanford University, is press director for she++, which aims to create community and momentum for female technologists and computer scientists.

Updated July 22, 2015, 11:09 AM

I'm not alone among my peers at Stanford University in seeing technology as the future. Indeed, for many of us, technology is the path toward change, and the Internet has democratized opportunities and communication.  Not all effects are good, but technology's capacity for positive change is undeniable.
We’re acutely aware of the ways in which the Internet can magnify cruel behavior, like cyberbullying. But the social flip side can be just as powerful. Take Brandon Stanton, the street photographer behind Humans of New York. He harnesses social media to share the stories of strangers he meets and interviews.

Far from settling with one-click Internet approval in the form of "Likes" — which he gets in spades — followers of Stanton's Facebook page recently raised over a million dollars to establish a scholarship fund for graduates of the Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brooklyn, which will also let them visit Harvard University on class trips, and it all started with a photograph of a student who cited his principal as his role model.

Or take a look at Khan Academy, coursera, Udacity and other providers of online courses. They provide free learning materials to their users, and an international network of namebrand universities and instructors to reach a classroom of millions.

Sure, not all effects of technology are positive — some social-impact goals on mission statements are dubious, to say the least, and the lack of diversity undercuts the industry — but technology’s capacity for positive change is undeniable. The building of life-changing inventions — like 3-D printed prosthetic limbs — show that the industry has the potential to continue to grow in beneficial ways, and we’d like to see this potential come to fruition.