 Thank you all for coming. I'm very pleased to present to you today Professor Harold Abelson from MIT. Harold Hell is the Class of 1922 Professor of EECS there. He's very well known for many contributions to education, both with and about computing. Starting from early work with Logo, some of you may have heard of Turtle Geometry, if not something to look up. Everybody here, or maybe a lot of you know about structure and interpretation of computer programs, a really landmark introductory programming course. I should say that's a very personally meaningful item to me. I was a freshman a few years ago, taking Hell's course, a prototype version of that course, pre-scheme. I later graduated to become a TA for that course, which taking the course was probably my first exposure to the intellectual depth of computing. Teaching it was maybe my first experience of the rewards of teaching computing. So it's been a big role in shaping my own personal path. In recent years, Hal has been very active in the border between information technology and policy. He was a driver and leader in MIT OpenCourseWare, active in Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation and many other related initiatives. He has been highly recognized for many of his contributions. I'll just name a couple of the more recent ones. In 2011, he was named ACM SIGC. That's the specialist group on computer science education for outstanding contributions to computer science education. And in 2012, he was named the ACM Carl V. Carlstrom Outstanding Educator. Today, he is our distinguished lecturer and he's going to take us from computational thinking to computational values. Hal. OK, the mics are working. OK. Thank you for that introduction. In fact, it's quite nice that you started talking about logo because that's where I'm going to start, too. And I'm going to give a little bit of a self-indulgent history and try to take the things that you mentioned and give you a sense of how they fit together, at least in my head. I want to say it's a tremendous treat to give this talk at Michigan because I think Michigan is one of the places where everything I'm going to say is obvious because you guys, more than almost any other place in the world, have the sense of a university as having institutional values. And what I'm going to be calling computational values are very close to the kind of thing that you guys have been doing. So you can take this as almost a review and realize that in many of the places I talk, these ideas are not accepted and are considered shocking. But let me at least start with, in my own intellectual journey, starts with Seymour Papert. Some people have had the privilege, as I have to actually know Seymour personally and work with him. Seymour started the logo project and he wrote a remarkable paper in 1971 called Teaching Children Thinking. Logo was this completely outrageous idea that you should take these computers which cost millions of dollars, which were used by very large businesses and by the Defense Department and that could be something that kids could use for education. And of course now everybody yawns because it's completely obvious, but this is 1971, right? People thought we were totally insane. Maybe they were right. But Seymour wrote this great paper called Teaching Children Thinking and it said that computing and these computational, these machines could be a source of intellectual empowerment for kids. And one of the things that under Seymour's guidance, starting as far back as 1969, 1970, we were trying to say this is about having, not just about a machine that can do something, but it was about a way that kids and all people can see themselves as intellectual agents. And for me, that's where it starts. You kindly mentioned the book I did with Jerry Sussman where the theme really is about computing as a revolution in the way we think. That computing programs are a way to express ideas and that took off and started, just started this notion that it's not just about getting a machine to do things. It's a way for expressing ideas. And then I think some of you know that a few years ago, Jeanette Wing, when she was head of the size directorate at NSF wrote a very influential paper called Computational Thinking which said part of making people, part of what we do as a discipline has some tremendously important ideas in there like abstraction, like the ability to think about processes and recursive structures, like the ability to define things behind APIs. And this paper became very, very influential. If you've done anything in the computer education world in the last four or five years, you probably run across the term computational thinking. But what I wanna talk about is there's more than that. There's the notion that this really isn't just about these ideas we teach in our classes, but there really are some values there. Some values that have to do with empowering people, that it's not just about the ideas sitting out there, but it's the notion that people should actually be able to get their hands on them. And I'd like to say that in this digital world, which as we all know is just starting, that there's the opportunity that people can use what we know, we as computer science teachers, and this talk is really addressed to those of you who are students, advanced students, those of you who are in the faculty who are thrilled by these ideas and want to share them with other people, that we can do that and that we know something very special. And it's not only about computational thinking, it's about the values that go along with those. The values that say that this stuff we know should be a force for empowerment of everyone. Not just sitting back and appreciating the notion that there's something like recursion, but people should be empowered in the digital world because that's more and more of the world in which everyone lives. Let me give you an idea. Let me show you something that for me, and I bet many people here have seen it, just exudes this notion of computational values. That's the Google end-gram viewer. How many people have seen that? Yeah, terrific. So you know what that is. It says I can search however many books Google has digitized, some reasonable fraction of all the printed books, and I can look at things like frequency of occurrence of words. And they're just marvelous things you can do. So here's a graph from 1960 to 2005 of some terms. So the red is a graph of the frequency of educational computing. And you can watch how that's risen and, oh my God, fallen, right? And the blue one, if you really wanna feel bad, is a graph of the term computer science education over the last 20 years. So looks like we may have a way to go. But anyway, you can do all sorts of great things with the Google end-gram viewer. And I don't know how many of you know about this, the culture andomics work? How many people know that? This is just, yeah, this is just incredibly beautiful. You take this massive corpus of books and then you start doing some analysis on it. And one of the things you can look at, many things for us you can look at, is you can look at how people are mentioned in the literature and you can take that as some measure of their popularity. So for example, if you look at the second one, Dan, that blue line that starts around 1933 and kind of goes slowly up, that's Mickey Mouse. That's how much Mickey Mouse is mentioned in the published literature. The red line's interesting, that's Che Guevara. So you see who hit a lot of popularity and then comes down the, let's see, the pale blue one up, the bottom pale blue one there is Neil Armstrong. And you can sort of say, how much were people in the public mind over a period as measured by just counting the number of times they appear in this giant corpus of books? And then you can do other things. You can say, let's look at the top, I think it is 70, most mentions, political figures. And let's see how much they were mentioned and that's this red line. So you can kind of see political figures kind of rise meteorically and then kind of stay up there as opposed to authors. The blue line here that rises kind of a slow slope. So the different professions have different kinds of characteristics. This purple one here is authors. That can tell you something about American culture and the one you really wanna see is this yellow thing that slinks along the bottom. That's mathematicians. So you can get some sense of our culture. And now you can go on and do even more kinds of analysis. You can say, look, if we average people getting popular and then losing popularity and then make some kind of curve that averages them, there's a half life for how fast they rise and there's a half life for how fast they fall. Okay, so some sort of average people becoming popular and then being forgotten. And then you can look at how that average is different for the different cohorts. And what you see is the rise time and the fall time decrease. The half life decreases as you go from say 1930 to 1980. And what's that mean? Well, that means that as a culture, we're getting faster. It says people get famous faster than they did 60, 80 years ago and people get forgotten faster than they did 60 or 80 years ago. So it's just amazing. This is a statement about the evolution of our culture. And it comes out of just counting the number of times that people are mentioned in published books if you have enough books. And I wanna introduce a word that maybe some of you've heard is the notion of a generative platform. A generative platform is something that can be used for things that the people who created that platform did not anticipate. So you have to think about, there was a shift with Google Books from thinking about books as individual works to there is now a thing called the corpus and we can ask questions about the corpus itself. And that is an example of generativity because the authors and the publishers who put this thing out just sort of never had a clue that their stuff could be used for this whole other thing. That's to me a marvelous example of generativity. Can be used for things that the original creators did not intend or did not anticipate. And then again, there's some other experiments going on with this. There's an equivalent experiment that was going on at Harvard. I don't quite know what happened to it about tracking the change in language in physics papers over the last 50 years. But you can imagine experiments like that. So there's a whole notion of generativity. I'll return to that later. I'll return to that later. But let me just start again with just another thread. I wanna put in this lecture. And this one goes back, oh gosh, 10, 11 years, which is forever in internet time. And those of you who thought about computing education will remember that there was a device that appeared 11, 12 years ago that was totally going to revolutionize all college education. And that was, of course, the Apple iPod, not the iPad, the iPod. And some of you might know that as part of this revolution, Apple made a deal with Duke University to give every entering freshman an iPod. And what they were going to do with this was to record and share lectures and other educational materials. Okay, we're gonna record and share lectures. What happened was that all the upperclassmen at Duke got completely pissed because the freshmen were getting these free iPods and they weren't. So Duke went back with Apple and renegotiated this deal so that all the undergraduates got a free iPod and everybody was happy. And this is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that's talking about this and how everybody was happy, but there was a problem. Because it turned out that what the undergraduates were doing with these iPods was recording and sharing lecture material. And out of the woodwork pops a friendly intellectual property attorney. So isn't it wonderful how a friendly intellectual property attorney always manages to pop out of the woodwork? With do they have permission from the person who wrote those lectures to share them? And professors should be aware of how easily this stuff could escape to the internet. And I read this and I just had this vision so some of you will be old enough to recognize this. My God, it was Napster, right? It's Napster for Academic Works. What a horrible idea. And then again, some of you will remember the era when the recording industry was sending threatening letters to colleges saying your undergraduates are downloading all this stuff and suing people. And I saw this in the MIT Tech. And I imagined, in my warped imagination, suppose it was this, right? And the thing to realize now, this was my warped imagination five, six years ago and I thought about it. But now in the world of MOOCs and online proprietary stuff that's happening, you can easily imagine this sort of thing happening. So it hasn't happened yet, but you can't imagine it. It is no longer a joke. Let me show you another example, my favorite example. Again, back to ancient history, 2001, when the RIAA was sending out threatening letters because students were threatening the basis of civilization by sharing Metallica, Metallica queries, you remember that, right? So, and this letter went out in the University of Southern California to all the USC students. And this is one of the most remarkable statements I've ever seen, just imagine, right? As an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual property. Right, just think about that. But this is like sent by a real university administrator, right? Now I would have thought that as an academic institution, USC's purpose had something to do with education. But apparently, but apparently not. And I think what we all have to appreciate right now is that there is a struggle going on for the soul of the university. And the struggle is there is a whole part of the world that wants to look at what we do as kind of producing certain kinds of goods. And the appropriate way to think about how those goods should be stewarded and kept is through this lens of property, in particular intellectual property. And to me, that is a real threat to the values that we do. And at least we should be aware of it. So what can we do about it? One of the things we can do is we can move from computational thinking to computational values to what I wanna call computational actions. And to me, Michigan is a place that as I look at does computational actions. That's why I really love being here. One of the ones that we did in MIT around the turn of the century was MIT OpenCourseWare, where the MIT faculty said we were gonna take the materials that we create for our courses and we're gonna put them up on the web for free, forever, for everybody. And we put up a whole bunch of things here, right? So we put up not only the lecture notes but the problems and the solutions and we got a lot of mail from faculty around the country saying, boy, thank you, thank you for putting up all those problems. Please take down the solutions. And we'd write back and say no, this isn't about you using the MIT course, it's about you creating your own stuff. OpenCourseWare today has gotten pretty, pretty popular. Our original goal was to publish all MIT courses. We don't quite have all but we're really, really close. MIT has about 2,000 unique courses. This includes, and of course there have been a lot of repeats. So there are about 2,000 active courses that are up. There are a lot of translations that have been made. There's, for places that don't have good internet access, there are mirror sites and we ship out discs. A lot of the MIT faculty participate, do you remember, you have to bear in mind that this is completely voluntary. And so one of the things that we wanted to do when we started it was we wanted to get into the culture that you'd put your course material on OpenCourseWare and we've done that pretty well. It's got a lot of usage around the world. What's interesting here? There's a lot of visits from inside MIT. So MIT is not a very big place but to get 162,000 visits from inside MIT is kind of saying something. It's saying we ourselves use this very much. Half the traffic's outside North America. Anyway, we keep statistics like this. But this was never meant to be an MIT only operation. When we got funded by the Mellon and Hewlett Foundation, we agreed we would set up something called the OpenCourseWare Consortium which was a whole bunch of universities that are kind of united in this notion that you should put your course material online and that's kind of evolving along. They went up under a Creative Commons license. So Creative Commons was a thing that I'd worked on it about the same time which said these are licenses designed to go along with your material that you put on the web. And there's a selection of licenses that you can use. Then when you select a license and put on it that license comes with metadata. So some computer program can say, oh yes, you can download this. You can maybe use this totally however you want or maybe you can use it for non-commercial use or maybe you can't make derivatives. Anyway, that's the Creative Commons licensing language. And this whole movement or bunch of stuff, MIT, and lots and lots of other people has come to be called open educational resources. It's this vision that one of the things you can do with the internet is take the products of great universities like ours and make them available to all of humanity. Right now the Eulet Foundation is kind of the main proponent of open educational resources, but you see even in stuff coming out from the White House and there's actually there's a big, I think a $10 million grant by the Gates Foundation to develop curriculum under the condition that it gets put out under Creative Commons share alike licenses or just Creative Commons licenses. And so we, in starting Creative Commons are just really happy with how this has gotten taken up. When we first were making Creative Commons and we sat around at some table, I think at a meeting at Harvard and said, what's success? We said, oh, success might be there a couple of million places that are using Creative Commons licenses. Now I forget what it is. It's in the hundreds of millions and it's becoming the standard way to share is to use these licenses. So that's very gratifying to us. And of course, now we're moving into the world of MOOCs. So for those of you who have been watching it, that's Coursera, which is the largest collection of universities putting up course materials. At the moment, people can register for the courses for free. The course material is not Creative Commons free that's being worked at. We don't know how this is going to happen, right? This is a movement that started, for those of you who know everything is about MOOCs, you should remember that 18 months ago, no one knew what that word meant. So we were at the very beginning of another shift. There's MIT in Harvard and Berkeley and University of Texas and a bunch of other places are also making some big shared online educational thing. Here's Udacity. Udacity actually to me is the most interesting of these. For those of you who are looking at the online MOOC world because they seem to be the least wedded to the idea that what they're putting up are semester courses. But anyway, there's a whole experimental world going on. What's not clear in this experimental world is how the licensing and sharing will go. One of the things we might all think about is in 2001 it was very easy to say for a university to say we're going to put up all of our material for free just because there weren't any business models. One of the things we should all be asking ourselves is in 2015 our university is going to be as willing to put up their course materials for free when there are business models. And I don't know what the answer is, but it's really something we should all watch. Enough of open courseware. The other thing that MIT did is we made an institutional repository called dSpace. And I certainly don't have to tell folks at Michigan about dSpace because you've got one. You're one of the very early partners and developers of dSpace with deep blue. And I don't have to explain it to you. It's the notion that, hey, the university has the responsibility to take the publications, the research publications of the faculty and put them up in some repository. And Michigan is a great, great worldwide leader in that. So I don't need to explain that to you. dSpace, by the way, went out as free software. And one of the things that's easy to do is if you want to put up a repository for your own institution or company or something, you can pull down the dSpace software and build a repository on that. And here's a graph of there are lots and lots of instances coming. There are now over 1,000 dSpace instances. Again, of places that are, that having the idea that the institution should be the place that shares its publication. And dSpace is morphed into something called DuraSpace and merged with this other thing called Fedora Commons. And it's all a very nice story of things that are taking off. And these are two companion visions. One is the open courseware vision, which really says that there really should be universal access to the course material of the great institutions of learning. And the other is the dSpace vision, which says there ought to be universal access to the research products of the great universities. And this one has turned in these days into what's called open educational resources. And this one has turned into the movement for institutional repositories. Okay. So that ends the introduction to this lecture. Because what I really wanna talk about is why. Why should universities support things like open educational resources and institutional repositories? And one reason is that if we don't do this, we're gonna find that academic values are increasingly marginalized and stressed. And I'll give you my favorite example from this. With apologies to Ben, I'm gonna make fun of Georgia Hopper, who was general counsel at UT. So here's a problem. I teach, we all teach. And what I like is that students sit in my class and take notes. But you realize, or I realize, that if students are taking notes and they are writing down more than just the bare facts and maybe capturing some of my unique expression, they are engaged in copyright infringement. I mean, how can I deal with this? I want, I really do like it that students sit in my class and take notes. But how can I condone this illegal activity? So this came up at University of Texas and the general counsel at the University of Texas came up with the right solution that you'd expect a general counsel to do. Which is to say, of course, faculty member, what you ought to do is get students to agree to a license. And even they even had the suggested license, right? These are my lectures. They are protected by state copyright law. They've been fixed in a tangible medium. You're authorized to take notes in a class and you understand that you're creating a derivative work of my lectures and you're authorized to use this, what does it say? Making one set of notes for your own personal use and no other. Right, can you imagine? Right? Right? Sally, what did Professor Corp. say in class yesterday? Oh, I'd love to show it to you but it'd be copyright infringement, right? This is the kind of craziness that you get into when you start thinking seriously that what we're engaged in in the university is the production of something like intellectual property. There's a wonderful book about this. It's pretty old by now but it's wonderful by Corrine McSherry who these days works at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This was her dissertation at Stanford Law School where she talked about the fights over who owns academic work. And comes up with this, what I think is a wonderful inside description of what's going on that we really do care about our stuff. We believe it should be wholesome, we don't believe it should be denigrated but the only vocabulary that the United States has for those, the only framework is talking about property. But the more that faculty get trapped into this rhetoric of saying this stuff is intellectual property, the more that the university simply becomes a place of production and the more that faculty simply get judged on their economic value and the more the whole notion that I think we all share of transmission of culture and education becomes marginalized and turned into something else. Let me expand on that a little bit. What's another reason why we should care about doing things like open educational resources and repositories, because if we don't, we are going to be shut out. We are going to be shut out of basically decisions about the future of the disposition of knowledge and I really mean that. It may sound very extreme but I really do mean it. Let's look at this paradigm of our publications, of scientific literature as property. How does it work? Let's put on the glasses, let's say this is about property and let's describe what scholarly publication is like. And the answer is some faculty member creates property and then you give that property away to a publisher. You give it away, it used to be your property and now it is their property and that sounds pretty weird. The publishers now own this property forever or 75 years past your death or whatever the duration of copyright is. And because that sounds so crazy, they will magnanimously allow the authors to retain some limited rights. And the university basically, which is maybe the place that helped fund this or the environment where it happened, gets no specific rights here. And if you think this had to do with the public, you're just on some other planet. The public doesn't enter into this deal at all. That's what scientific publication looks like from the perspective of saying it's property and I mean it literally, right? How do you give your property away? You give your property away by signing a copyright transfer agreement. That's what copyright transfer is. It says, I'm going to give this property to the publisher. And we all sign it when we want to go publish. And it's a contract. I mean, it's like a real contract. Not some stupid piece of paper that you have to do at the very last day when you've edited your thing and you got to put it in the envelope to the journal. You are signing a contract and that contract basically determines can you use this thing in teaching? Can you talk about it? Can you post a copy on the internet? And typically the details are determined completely by the publisher. Here are some rights that are generously granted by Elsevier that, gosh, if you publish a paper as a grad student, you know what? You can use that paper in your thesis. Isn't that great? If Elsevier didn't allow you to do that, you couldn't. You can present that paper at a meeting. Right, if you didn't have that, your talk would be a derivative work of this thing that is now Elsevier's property. So Elsevier grants you the rights for that and you can post a personal version on a website of maybe just sometimes just the text. Right, so that's the nature of this agreement. Here are some from Wiley Blackwell. Right, isn't this great? You can post the original manuscript prior to peer review. So these are the generous rights the publisher gives you to this thing that you might have thought was your paper. You can reuse for non-commercial publication and up to 250 words of text. Right? So these are the, this is what Elsevier is claiming, the law says, but is it actually? That's Wiley Blackwell, actually. But Elsevier. The other one was Elsevier, but is it the actual fact of what the law, the case law is? I mean, has it been presented from? Excellent, excellent question. And there's a lot of confusion about it. There's a sense, you have to realize there's a thing called the copyright law, which is determined by Congress, okay? But in this example, you have signed a contract and as far as U.S. law requires, if you want to, if two consenting parties sign a contract, that's a contract. This has nothing to do really with copyright law. This is a contract that, there are very few things, there are very few what are called inalienable rights in the United States that you may not contract away. You can't sell someone your arm. You can't sell yourself into slavery. A few others, but other than that, this isn't about copyright and law and law. This is you have agreed to a contract, right? Yeah, I'm glad you asked because there's a lot of confusion about that. Anyway, this is Wiley Blackwell. In other words, what's going on is we're moving towards private monopoly control of the scholarly literature and I really do mean monopoly control. If you look at scientific publishing over the last decade, it's been a story of consolidation. So Wiley grew by six-fold in the last 10 years. Elsevier gobbled a lot of stuff. We went in from a situation in 1998 where there were a small number of players. To 2008, we're in scientific publication, there really are only four companies. So it really is about, just like we talk about media consolidation in the United States, there's scientific publishing consolidation. The other thing that happens, I mean for example, when Wiley acquired Blackwell, since everybody knows this stuff is so valuable, they paid 18 times earnings for that. And one of the things that's happening is the journal prices are now reflecting the cost, those acquisition costs. So another phenomenon, other than there's monopoly control of this, is that the journal prices are skyrocketing to pay for this acquisition activity. Here's MIT over a decade. I don't see any reason why you and Mitch would be any different, can ask your libraries. But basically this, that sort of dark, really dark black line, that's the consumer price index over a decade. 1986 to 2004, two decades almost. That's that black line. That red line is what the MIT libraries spent on journals. And everyone's getting more journals and it's cool and everything, but the number of journals published is that green line. So it's not that they're really way more journals. And then you could say, well, you know, paper's gotten really expensive. So if you look at the less dark purple line, that's what the MIT libraries have spent on books and the yellow is the number of books. So it ain't that paper's getting more expensive or production's getting more expensive. It's that what you're seeing is flat-out monopoly consolidation and pricing. What's it mean, really? I don't know, you must have gotten letters from the library saying, which journals can we blow off? Libraries have a real, real problem here. Their costs are going up at three times at three times the rate of inflation. What's it mean concretely? If you wanted subscription to theoretical computer science, these numbers are about two years old. You could buy a nice, really nice plasma TV for one year subscription to theoretical computer science. If you earn, theorists don't make a lot of money, right? If we find a little sexier thing, right? If you look at applied mechanics and engineering, now you can go buy a pretty good car for the one year price of subscribing to that journal. Oh, and by the way, I would say, I'm not even supposed to show you these prices because these prices are individually negotiated between the publishers and the libraries and the libraries are supposed to keep them secret. So don't tell anybody. But you know, we computer scientists, we're just low life, right? Compared to some places. If you want a really good car, okay? You have to subscribe to something like brain research. Right? Right, where 20, do you believe that? Over $20,000 for a one year subscription to one journal. But of course, you know why it is, right? If the libraries came to you and said, you know, we're gonna stop our subscription to theoretical computer science, you'd all scream. And certainly the biologists would just kill if they said we're gonna stop subscribing to brain research. So there's no, this really is a monopoly position. You get an entrenched place where there actually is no price elasticity or infinite price elasticity, whatever you call it. Now how can this persist, right? So you look at this thing and you say, my God, how can this possibly happen? Right, you don't get paid for publishing something, you don't get paid for reviewing something. How is it that the prices are so high? And the answer is really pretty simple. It's that the way the paper publication system is structured right now is that it is a dialogue between the publisher and some poor faculty member who's trying to get tenure, a graduate student who's trying to get a PhD thesis or something, and you have no negotiating power at all, right? Congratulations, you can either sign the copyright agreement or you can't publish your paper in the ACM journal. What are you gonna do? Right, the total empower balance. So what has to happen is there's got to be some kind of collective action on the part of faculty. You saw some of it, some mathematicians started by Timothy Growers who got the Fields Medal, which is the Nobel Prize of Mathematics, got fed up with this and started a boycott. And that got a lot of news, right? There's a place you can go still. What's the number here? 50,000, 60,000? I remember how few people signed it. You can go to thecostofknowledge.com and you can go sign the thing which says I'm not gonna publish in Elsevier journals. But then you have to mean it, right? So that's one thing you can do. There can be boycotts. The other thing that can happen and is what happened I think first at Harvard, actually first at University of Southampton and then at Harvard and then at MIT is the faculty actually passed a resolution which say that when you as a faculty member publish something at MIT, prior to even you having written it, MIT has non-exclusive rights to use that for non-commercial purposes. So this is prior to any kind of copyright agreement or publication or any of that. It's just part of being a faculty member at MIT. This was passed unanimously by the faculty which means that both faculty members who attended the faculty meeting voted for it. Right, we know how it goes, right? We have an opt out permission because we had to opt out in order to get a really pretty wide scale unanimous vote. So people can opt out but you opt out on a per publication basis. But the presumption is that MIT can use this stuff for non-commercial use which typically means put it in D-space. And then the chairman of the faculty says the kind of wonderful things that chairman of faculty say when this happens about how the wonderful values of MIT. I would love to see Michigan do this, please do it. There are a bunch of places that have open access mandates and it would be wonderful to see Michigan as part of that. And your provost, ex-provost is a champion of this sort of stuff. It's a thing to try and do. It has to come from the faculty but there's also pushback, right? There's pushback and one pushback's coming from Elsevier. So Elsevier if you look at the actual publication contract it spells out rights you can do. I showed you that before and in 2010 they amended that to say well you have the right to do that except if you happen to be at an institution that has one of these mandates is what that turns in. So it turns out that faculty from MIT and Harvard and a couple of other places actually have fewer rights retained when they publish something in Elsevier publications than other places. That's one kind of pushback. So there's a war going on and it's about real fights, real money, real lobbyists in front of Congress. You threw in a remark about publishing in ACN. Which side is- Did I say publishing in ACN? I thought you said ACN. I don't remember if I did but I'll say it anyway. ACN- Be very careful. I wanna, let me not get dragged too much off track but many of the societies, not ACN, many of the societies their publication stuff has gone bankrupt and been brought up by Elsevier. ACN is not, ACN is independent and ACN has again a pretty hard policy in the ACN digital library. They have recently put in some kind of measure where you can on your webpage put up effectively something that'll authorize people to go to the ACM digital library and get your paper for free. And we've had discussions with ACM about this. ACM's in a very tight spot because 35% of ACM income comes from the ACM digital library and they're sort of saying we're stuck but let me get, we can go back and talk about that later. Anyway, I was saying there's a fight going on and now there's pushback to the pushback. So on Valentine's Day, there was a bill introduced in Congress called Fair Access to Science and Technology Research which would effectively extend the current National Institute of Health Policy that says within a year, six months after you publish something funded by NIH research, that has to go in some kind of public access thing. So that happened on Valentine's Day. The Association of American Publishers said what came back and said what you would expect and there's a great lobbying war going on in Congress right now. And that's where it is except as I was preparing this lecture, shut up. As I was preparing this lecture on Friday, last Friday, this amazing thing happened which is the Office of Science and Technology Policy put out a new administration directive that this doesn't have to be approved by Congress and takes an effect right away which says every federal agency that funds more than $100 million worth of federal research has to make a plan for that's like the NIH one that says all of the publications funded by that agency have to go up in some kind of open access archive. And I don't quite know what to say. It's been exactly one working day since this memo came out. And we'll all see what happens. Hopefully we will all support it in the fights to come and the pushback to come but this is a real, real, real change. Kind of policy where you have access for six months for free and then perpetuity they keep the rights to the publications. If you missed it in the first two months it will be paid for. What's going on is all the publishers are scrambling and they're all doing all sorts of different things. But in any case, this is a real, real, real change and it's a chance to get involved in what's happening. So this is new, right? This is last Friday. We can all congratulate ourselves. But you know, this is like the real world and there's another shoe to drop and another shoe and another shoe and another shoe. So we need to keep alert. Let me move to something else. Another consequence of these publication agreements are the way they are licensed to your library. So when your library licensed stuff from Pacer or various places, there's a prohibition on doing indexing. So I don't know if you're like me but if you think about generated systems this totally drives you nuts because it means a thing like the culture nomics stuff that I showed in beginning where you say, oh gosh, you know, it's not about individual articles. It's about the whole corpus. It's locked out. You just can't do it, right? So for many of these publishers, open access means you can go sit in front of the web and get one of these journals one at a time and an article one at the time. But you can't do all the data mining that we of all people in the world know is incredibly, incredibly valuable that's getting locked out. There's the actual words in Elsevier. You cannot use a web crawler. You can't use a robot to go get this stuff. And just think of all the research grants that you wanna run out and write that's analyzing all this stuff. It's a tremendous world that's simply locked out but Elsevier, of course, is not stupid. They know that there's value there so they have an operation called Science Direct which can give you APIs which has APIs that allow you to access the corpus in a different way but of course it's not generative, right? Because you're being restricted to the API that Elsevier has provided. And this is not a generative platform. So this notion of generativity may actually get stillborn when it comes to the scientific literature. There's a wonderful book that I hope you've all read one of the greatest titles in the world by Jonathan Zichran called The Future of the Internet and how to stop it. And what it's about is the importance, what Jonathan says, he said Harvard Law School, he says the real thing that's made the internet takeoff is generativity. It's the fact that the network is generative and even if you look at the PC industry, right? The PC for all of us sort of beat on Microsoft for being an evil monopolist, the PC turned out to be a generative platform because Microsoft never said you can't write a program and run it on a PC. So the PC for whatever Microsoft made for it, the PC allowed other people to make other kinds of software that would run on the PC and that was a kind of generativity and according to Zichran that was very important. That's what Zichran was saying in 2008. Last year, two years ago, this is what Zichran was saying, he's saying the PC industry is dead. That generativity is dead. Why is that generativity dying? Because we're replacing the mode in which we write software that gets distributed in many, many, many different ways from things that are distributed through app stores. The distribution mechanisms for software are becoming concentrated and we're getting software distribution is now becoming a walled garden. And as Zichran says, if we allow ourselves to live in these walled gardens, even if now they seem kind of okay, eventually you're under control of the gardener and that just kills generativity. So for all the apps that are floating around for the iTunes store and the Amazon store a little bit less and the Google store a little less, nonetheless, you have to, somebody is controlling what that distribution mechanism is if you write software. And so what happens, the network effects in software leads to monopoly positions that leads to concentration of the distribution channels and that leads to decline of generativity and that's what is happening to us and our business in writing software right now. Okay, let me try to pull this together. And the thing I wanna ask is, are our students gonna be in a world where the platforms they work with are generative? Are they gonna be able to really tinker with this infrastructure the way that all of us kind of grew up assuming that when we learned about computers, we could tinker with them and we could kind of do what they wanted and there was something that it was limited only by our creativity, not by somebody who could control what could go out there. Well, let me show you a nice example. There's this nice kid-friendly programming language which you may have heard of, which Apple said you may not put in the Apple store, you may not distribute this thing because Apple has some policy about distributing software that has built-in interpreters. So anybody know what that is? That's MIT Scratch. So MIT Scratch is this wonderful piece of stuff that's done in MIT. It is not permitted to be on the iPad, for example. Right, this is just a very, very weird world. So, will our students be able to tinker with the kind of wonderful infrastructure that we are experiencing building now? Is it losing its generativity? Is it losing its approach? I think, let me just end with a little bit of what I'm working on. I'm sort of asking, gee, is mobile computing gonna be generative? Because mobile computing is kind of, these are wonderful little gadgets, right? But they're coming out as consumer products with closed things, with closed concentrated places where you distribute apps. So what I've been working on, just as a small advertisement, is a system that says, all kids should be able to program apps for their phones. This is on Android. I'll give you a hint of it. Here, I'm gonna make a little app. I have, here's a phone that's connected to the computer and I'm gonna say, here's a little design space and I pull out a button. And as soon as I pull out a button, that button appears on the phone. And I said, gee, I'm gonna make this button look like my cat by saying, its image will look like, that really is my cat. I'm gonna put in a little piece of sound that's a cat's meow. And then I'm gonna say, I wanna program the thing so that when I press the button, the cat will meow. And I go here and there's a blocks interface language and I drag out the little block that says, what to do when the button clicks? And I drag out the little thing that says, the thing that plays music should play the cat meow. And I put that there, now I'm done. At that moment, if I touch the phone, the cat will meow. So that's just a tiny, tiny, tiny, it's not even hello world, I'm imagining hello world. But you can imagine how an environment like that makes things easy. The phone also knows, has a location sensor and that location sensor attacks, goes to a geographic database, so I can say also when you press the button, have a label that says the phone should say where it is. Now that's exactly how hard it is to build an app. It's done now. But you can find out more at appinventor.mit.edu. It's a little hint of what we're trying to do. With that I'll end, but I do wanna say that I hope, that I hope you'll get is that, I wanna leave you with the thought that those of us who teach computing today know something very, very special. And it's not just recursion is powerful, which of course it is. It's that there's this sense of power that people can get by having some control over this infrastructure. It's this sense of computational values. It's this idea that the infrastructures that allow us to do all of the things that made us love computing were that largely because they were generative platforms. It's the notion that this is really precious and it's something that we should not lose and that we better keep aware of if we want our students to have the same kind of wonderful experience in awakening in computers that we do. So thank you. Thank you.