So -- how are we doing? Technology. So thank you so much for this award. And I've got to say when I -- when I heard about it, my first reaction was one of humility. Just thinking about what it means to be recognized by a group for contributions to computer science education. And thinking about what the award encryption said talking about starting with LOGO, up with app inventor, talking about Creative Commons, talking about open course ware and it kind of tempted me to do something that I think may be a little dangerous in this talk which was to try and give a perspective that says how these relayed. And that's always a little foolish because one's career is never rational and never makes sense, but nonetheless, I'm going to try. And hopefully, hopefully you'll bear with me.
When I first showed up at MIT, I was -- I had the tremendous good fortune to work for Seymour Papper, who is to my mind sort of the greatest thinker about computer education, certainly since people started thinking about computer education. And when I went to work for see more, he was working on this monumental seminal paper called teaching children thinking. And "teaching children thinking" started out this is written in 1969, 1970, came out in 1971 and here's how the paper starts. It starts with a vision, first of all, about computing being for kids. This 1971, which computers cost millions of dollars. But the idea that first of all, they were for kids and secondly, it was a notion about empowering them. About using computers to allow kids to see themselves as intellectual agents. As intellectual agents who are able to have an effect on their world. And to me the first two paragraphs of this 1971 paper are still one of the most important things that anybody has said about computing and education. And then 10 years later, when Jerry Sussman and I wrote "structure and interpretation of computer programs" we were directly, directly inspired by Seymour's work and in fact, probably as far as I'm concerned, maybe the most important sentence in our book is a thing in the preface which says, "Computer programs are written for people to read and only incidentally for computers to execute." It's about ideas, it's about intellectual empowerment and then about 20 years later than that, Jeanette Wing came out with an extremely seminal column on computational thinking which is also talking about the same kind of ideas and the empowering notion of this wonderful stuff that we do with our students around computing.
But in thinking about it, and going back and reading Pappert's words, the way we're talking about computational thinking which permeates this conference and lots and lots of conferences, doesn't quite capture what was going on in those very early days and doesn't quite capture what I think is a complete picture of what we're trying. Because it's not computational thinking so much. It's about how we look in this burgeoning digital world and stee as a source of empowerment not only for kids but for everybody. And so this kind of leads to the view that just talking about computational thinking by itself is insufficient and we need to be talking also about computational values. Now computational values -- what do I mean by that? I mean, it's having the values not only that these are cool ideas but that these ideas should be empowering and that people should be able to exercise these great things in thinking about their world and having an impact on the world. Let me show you what I mean, let me show you something that to me just absolutely exudes computational values. Many of you know Maggie Johnson spoke about it yesterday in the Google session, which is Google's N gram viewer. So what Google, what some folks at Google did is having scanned something like 14% of the world's books put this in a database and you can go -- how many people have gone and seen the N gram viewer? It's just a tremendously fun thing. You can go up and say search through this corpus of literature and show me a graph of just the word "frequency" over the period of years. And what you have here -- you can view this as encouraging or disconcerting. This is a graph from -- right? Over the past 20 years of computational -- of computers in education versus educational computing. And you can look at that drop, that rise and drop as computers got in and this relative drop over the recent years and just think about what this means about our profession and what people are thinking about it. But let's leave that. That's a different topic. Go play with this by yourself. They're tremendous things that you can do.
But you can go beyond that. So last -- two months ago, some folks from Google and some folks from Harvard started using this to build something that they're calling culturenomics. And it says can we do some data processing on this massive, massive accumulation of books and learn something about our culture? So you can learn all sorts of interesting things. This is a -- these are some graphs from the paper. So for example if you look on the left, that middle one on the left is a graph of the frequency of the -- of how famous various people are. So that black line that goes up is Bill Clinton. The red one that starts in 1920 where the blue one that starts up in 1920 and goes up is Mickey Mouse and you can start looking at how people, ideas get famous in our culture. If you look on the right at the bottom, you can see averages, right? Not only look at individuals, you can look at averages and you see something like that red line that says political figures tend to get recognized relatively late and rise up and become pretty famous and hang around for a long time as opposed to authors which are the blue line which start -- this is the average fame. They're looking at the top 50 most famous people, famous means most mentioned in the literature. And you can watch their rise and fall. That yellow line in the bottom by the way is mathematicians. (laughter) So you can sort of see what happens in our culture, and then you can go beyond that. So, if you look in the middle -- in the bottom right, what you see is if you look at an average person, those averages they tend to get famous and their mentions rise up and it decays. So you can look at the half life by which people get famous and which they decay. If you look at the small inserts, you're seeing that blue insert in the bottom is the change in the half life of how people get famous over time.
And so what you see over time, on the average, people get famous faster. And the red insert is how therefore gotten. How they -- fame goes down. So on the average, people get less famous faster. So what you see is that somehow overall, there's an acceleration in our culture in thinking about reputation and fame.
Wonderful wonderful paper. You can play with it.
This is an example of what I want to call using a generative platform. With the Google N gram viewer and lots of other thigz, our accumulated literature becomes a generative platform. By generative platform which I'll come back to later, I mean something which can get used for things that the people who made it had no idea that it was going to get used for. So Google came along and just turned these individual books into something that we can now discover things about the rate of consult it's a marchg louse thing. This week Paul who has been maintaining the physic library has been taking his collection can he can do because it's open source, remember that for later, he can do this because it's open source is coming to Harvard hand air going to do the same study for particle physics literature and say what with can we learn about the growth and evolution of ideas in physics. We'll come back to that later.
Let me switch to a different story about generativity and technology and information and the power of information and the attitudes that people have towards computational values.
So now I'm going to go back oh, oh, gosh it's eight years. So, if you can think all the way back eight years where there was revolutionary technology which was going to transform university education, remember that? It's called the ipod. Not the ipad. The ipod. And what you're seeing here is a article from the chronicle of implication that talks about an experiment that started here a year before at Duke where Duke made an arrangement with Apple that all the freshmen at diewk were going to get iPods for the wonderful computational values this they should ab IBM to record lectures and share them and modify them and stuff. And what you're seeing is an article that came out a year after that experiment started. One of the things that happened in the article is the freshmen got all these free iPods. Upper classmen all got pissed because they didn't get them free. So what this article is talking about is how Duke went back to Apple and negotiated that all the undergraduates could get iPods and everyone was happy. But there was a problem. Out of the woodwork pops a helpful intellectual property attorney. Isn't it great that helpful intellectual property attorneys are always popping out of the woodwork?
Do they have permission to share this stuff? Do faculty realize how easy it would be for this stuff to get on the Internet.
What a thought. People mighting sharing stuff on the Internet. So I read this and I had this vision suddenly. You know, Napster, the idea that there are students all over the world in flagrant disrespect and disregard of intellectual property values learning and sharing knowledge.
And a couple of weeks later -- this is, of course, the era which is in fact still going on where the RIAA was sending threatening letters and suing college students and read this in MIT tech. And I had a vision that maybe some day it would be that. And a couple of people laughed right now. And when I thought about it, I thought of it as a joke. But today it's not a joke. As you look at more and more educational material that we are starting to use that's locked up in proprietary platforms and proprietary content management systems, you're going to have to start asking yourself is the university going to become more and more a marketplace for packaged ideas and packaged content? And less and less a place of open inquiry and academic freedom? That's going to be a main theme of my talk. This talk is really written for us. Those of us who love computational values, who resonate to it. Who recognize to it. And who devoted our careers to bringing this mode of thinking, the love for this thinking, the values that say this thinking is precious to our students. And what I really want to say and I'll come back to this throughout the talk is that in this talk about academic freedom and academic values and university things, we are special. Because we are the ones who are introducing students to the power of what it means to understand information and its implications. So it's not that we're a bunch of academics, it's that our role here in SIGCSE is very, very special. And, of course, I wanted to say there's a strong link of computational thinking and computational values to academic freedom and academic values precisely because information is so much now the currency by which all of that stuff is expressed.
And the thing to realize is that for all of us who sort of revel in the power, revel in the power to do something like Google NGrams, there are people who are afraid of it and there are people who resist it and who fall into sloppy ways of talking about the university. One of my favorite examples is you'll remember even way back in 2001 when the RIAA was sending letters to college campuses and threatening to sue people, this letter came out from Dean at USC. This is an e-mail that went to every undergraduate at USC which is to me one of the most remarkable statements made by a college administrator. Look what it says. As an educational institution, USC's purpose is to promote the creation of intellectual property. Isn't that amazing? I would have thought -- I would have thought that as an academic institution, USC's purpose had something to do with education. But apparently not. Apparently we were being asked to become something else that's less about education and more about looking at these ideas and these things we do as property.
Because you see -- and I really mean this, there's a struggle going on right now for the soul of the university. About whether it's going to be a place of open sharing and knowledge and a place of generativity, I'll come back to that later. Or a place whose job is somehow to help solidify this information as property.
And there's a real fight going on. It's going on right now and many of you are involved in it. And so when this progression from computational thinking to computational values, we might want to think about what our computational actions we might do that start to reinforce, to reinforce the sense that we have that people ought to be able to relish the power that they get from computational thinking and computation allied yaz.
One example of what I consider a computational action is the work we did 10 years ago now MIT open course ware which is celebrating -- it's celebrating its 10th anniversary last year. That, I thought, was a very innovative and bold idea that at a time when colleges were talking about selling their curriculum, MIT basically said look, we're going to take all of our stuff and we're going to put it up free, not only free that people can read it but free in that it's under a Creative Commons license which allows people to modify and redistribute and repurpose it. The idea that the stuff that we made for our students at MIT could it self become generative. So that hopefully people would use it for things that MIT never imagined. So that started. It's been pretty successful. If you want to see the recent statistics last month, on what happened at MIT, we started with the idea we'd get a bunch, of course,s maybe 500 and at some point we'd be done when quote all 2,000 MIT courses came up. We have 27 course -- 2700 courses up now. We involved something like 80% of the MIT faculty, which means that 80% of the faculty are involved in a course through which open course ware materials go up. And it's been pretty successful. Here's our impact distribution. So used to think 10 million visitors a month was a large thing. These days it's 10 million visitors, eh, in the Internet that's kind of small. But nonetheless, we're pretty proud of it. There's a lot of video traffic from YouTube. And only about half of it is from North America. When we started this we were specifically thinking about U.S. and U.S. universities. It was a surprise that it went to global impact but that should be no surprise 10 years later when you look at what happened with the Internet. And, of course, there are lots of things that have been happening over the last oh, gosh six months, 6 months, a year, that are taking that to the next level. Most of you I'm sure are familiar with the great work coming out of Stanford, the original Stanford AI course that came out with Peter Norvik and intas 7Tran and this is machine learning course and the stuff by Daphne Culler and there's a wonderful burgeoning of not only do you get the educational written content but there are actually participatory courses. It's a wonderful wonderful thing. MIT has its own entry into this that you splay heard of called MIT X and MIT X is going to launch on Monday, watch for it. And it's going to be lectures. It's going to launch with a course on circuit theory. And it's going to have the lectures you expect and interactive problems that you can do and if you do it, you can get certificates from MIT. And they wouldn't let me show the rest. I said can I actually show the cool stuff? There's a lot of cool stuff that's not here. They said no, no, mostly cloudy skies don't. Wait until Monday. So trust me, there's a lot more cool stuff and if you check the announcement on Monday, you'll see what we're putting out as a model of kind, of course.
And another thing that MIT is doing which is a little bit unique, is a commitment not only to put up this material for free sharing but to actually create the open source platform that we're using and making that completely open and generative. Because it's not our intention that everybody should take the MIT courses or even that MIT should go publish something to a closed proprietary platform that we put up the MIT courses but that people should be able to take the stuff that we've built and extend that both in content and in technology to be something better than anything that we could imagine. So watch for that on Monday.
So, of course, this has grown into the movement for open educational resources. That's got a lot of push from the Ulit foundation. Recently, a lot of push from the Gates Foundation. And just looking at this burnl oning of material. This incredible, incredible change. It's sort of a vision, a vision that I've been very, very proud to be help crafting 10 years ago at MIT, this notion that the educational materials of the world's greatest places should be open to everyone. And that's one of a pair of visions. The other one is the institutional repository vision which is a thing we created at MIT called D space which is MIT's publication repository and the notion is if you publish a paper as a faculty member or anything, you put it in MIT's repository. And again, that's a vision also that the research output of the world's great research institutions should be available to everyone.
And that second one is what those days was very unique is MIT's institutional repository, MIT D space and it's broken up into communities and for example you can go to it and you can look at oh, the one I'm in which is MIT computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory and in there you can go look and you can find a list of authors and there are a bunch of collections and I can see particular collections and I can pick a particular paper which going back to Papper and Minsky is the 1968 artificial intelligence laboratory progress report which by the way has never been openly published and you can go and look at that and what you get is a very important page. You get an indexing page that tells what it's about. And it has a critical thing which those of you who are into this kind of information in the web will recognize as a handle, a handle is a permanent URL and the significance of that is that this paper is now siteble in the scholarly literature. So small -- a small bit. But librarians will recognize that the critical point of that expressing. So we've taken this paper from 1968, oh, and, of course, there's the paper, right? We've taken the paper and made it a searchable thing as part of scholarly literature. That's a wonderful kind of vision. D space is kind of like open courseware taking off. The nice thing is D space also went out as open source platform so that if you were at an institution and you wanted to put up a repository, download the D space stuff and put it up, there are lots and lots of instances that have grown a couple years ago, D space merged with fedora commons and now there's a whole generative institutional publication platform movement started. So -- what's very nice is the two visions we started at MIT, we weren't the only ones but we were -- but 10 years ago we were among the first that were doing this, have matured and grown up into an open educational resources movement and an institutional repository movement.
Now I want to get to the meat of the talk, which is why?
Why should universities support and like these kinds of things? And there are two big reasons and they're reasons that are critical to us today. Both as scholars and I'll say later particularly as computer science educators. One is that without these kind of initiatives, academic values are becoming increasingly marnl nallized. I showed you that quote from USC in 2001. I'll show you another one. This is from the general counsel's office of the University of Texas. And I'm sore' to put up so much text on the slide, this one is so wonderful it has to speak for itself and it's dealing with the following problem, which is as a professor, I lecture. And I say things in my lectures and I really like it, like it that students in my lectures take notes. But, if they should happen to write down something that goes beyond the raw facts and capture some of my creative expression, that act of taking notes is copyright infringement.
So how do I deal with this quandary, right, on the one hand I really like it that they take notes and on the other hand how can I be condoning this copyright infringement so, of course, the general counsel's office at UT looked at this -- I shouldn't mock Georgia hopper, she's really trying to do something. But as general counsel's office, they come up with the obvious solution which is you get students to agree to a license at the beginning of this semester. And they even proposed a model license. My lectures are my copyrighted intellectual property. You have permission to make a copy for your own use and no other. Imagine that. What did pro professor Abelson talk about in his systems course yesterday? O gee, I'd like to tell you but it would be copyright infringement. Right? But can you imagine? What's happening? And to get a book I strongly, strongly recommend by Kurran McSherry, I guess it's her dissertation to Stanford law school and now you recognize that name on the legal staff of the electronic frontier foundation, talks about how we are confusing, we're taking the way that we talk about how we treat ideas that are precious and that gets aglom rated to the notion of property and we as the university community are deeply confusing property rights with academic rights. I strongly recommend this book. Just a wonderful thing. But let's push on this a little bit. Let's push on the idea that these things are property which is what the -- which is what the culture is telling us all around now. You how does it work? What's going to happen is the more we believe in this, the more universities are going to be disempowered and marginalized in thinking about the future of the scholarly record. And I really mean that. How does it work? How do we think about knowledge and research values as property? How does the currencies testimony work? How does the system that we all live in work? You write a paper, you're an author and then what you do is you give that property, right, according to copyright law, this thing you right is property. You give that property to the publisher. The publisher gets to keep it forever. And in return for that -- because that sounds so awful on the face of it, and it is awful, they will magnanimously grant you back some limited rights to the stuff that you used to think about in your paper but now is their paper. And, of course, the university which may be funded this or housed it or made it happen, gets no specific rights at all. And if you think about that gee, the public has something to do with this, you're just on some other planet, the public has nothing to do with this. Let me give you an example. First of all, when I say, "give it" what do I mean, you go sign that copyright transfer form, you are transferring ownership of that paper to the journal publisher.
And we all do that.
And then what's in there, that's a contract. When you click this thing, you are signing a contract. And that contract spells out particular rights that you can retain as the author and everything else is now owned by the publisher. So for example, if you go look at Elsiber, you magnanimously get the right to take that article, take Elzibe re's article and include that in a dissertation, you magnanimously get the right to speak about the paper at a conference. Because if you didn't have the right, it would be copyright infringement. It would be a derivative work. You magnanimously get the right to post that -- to post Elziver's paper on a personal Web site.
And anyway, there are a whole bunch of these rights. Here's an equivalent one from wily blackwell. So they've magnanimously give you the right to reuse some figures and up to 250 words of this thing you might have thought of was your research paper. But now to belongs to wily blackwell.

In other words, -- and I really mean this -- we are moving towards monopoly control scholarly record and I do mean monopoly control. If you look at the mergers and acquisitions in the scientific publishing or whole academic publishing industry over the last 10 years, it's remarkable. The top 5 publishers now control some overwhelming part of the market. Elziber grew by a factor of 4. When wily acquired blackwell in 1996, they paid 14 times earnings. Just imagine that. What's going on? What's going on is these organizations have tremendously smart people in there. They're great people. And they recognize maybe before anyone else, the power of the digital environment in this thing that people thought of as papers becoming something infinitely more valuable. But as a result of these mergers and acquisitions what's happening is we and academic university libraries are paying back the costs of those acquisitions. We're paying back the cost of spending 18 times earnings. I'll show you data from MIT, this is what our library -- this data from our library over the past 10 years, that dark blue line that's rising is Consumer Price Index. So that's inflation. That red line is the price that the MIT libraries are paying for scholarly journals. That green line on the bottom just for comparison is the number of journals that the MIT libraries have been purchasing. And if you have a doubt that this has to do with monopoly positioning in journals rather than, you know, printing costs or something, that purple line is books. So this really is the effect of if you're in any kind of university that has any kind of biology department at all, you simply cannot afford not to subscribe to Cell. If you have a computer science thing, you simply cannot afford not to subscribe to theoretical computer science and price doesn't matter. So there's a lock in monopoly position. Just to bring that concretely, right? So a subscription -- this is a little bit old data from MIT to theoretical computer science costs, you know, $6,000 a year, in fact, that slide I made is so old that at that time $6,000 was the cost of a really good plasma TV. The plasma TV price, of course, has plummeted. Journal price has not gone down. If you want to apply to computer engineering, you've gone a little higher, you've got the price of a pretty good mid sized car. This is annual -- this is annual subscription fees paid by your college library. But, of course, we want good cars, we want BMWs. If you want to get to BMW status, I don't think computer science can align, but, if you want to go into something like brain research, you can buy a BMW with an annual price of subscribing to brain science. It's amazing.
How can it be? How can it be that the system persists? How can it be that we write the articles for free, we do the reviewing. And then all of the ownership, all of the ownership goes into the last step of distributing it? There's a phrase that people use in this business that says, "The midwife doesn't get to keep the baby." But that's exactly what's happening in scientific publishing. And the reason is that no one that we are all -- we all stand on our own two feet we're all look for our own tenure and promotion. Is doesn't matter how obnoxious they with are free access, when it comes down to getting a paper published we're going to go in the top journal and it doesn't matter. That's because we all stand on our own and aren't in a position to take any collective action on this.
Well, that started to happen. Two months ago where one of the world's top mathematicians, winner of the fields medal organized a boycott against Elziver. 12 started to pick it started to take off. You splay read in the paper. You're inviteed to go sign the Elziver boycott if you like. There's a Web site called the cost of acknowledging, you can read about that. That's one kind of response. But there's another kind of response that's not about us as individuals. It's about us as institutions. Three years ago the MIT faculty published a mandated open access policy. So you can opt out but we've got a policy that says it's our values, it's our values as a faculty that we think our work should be disseminated as widely and as openly as possible. The MIT policy says that if you come to MIT, you have granted MIT a nonexclusive license to distribute your works for purposes of open access. And then there was a great inspiring statement by the chair of our faculty about MIT and the flow of ideas. This was passed unanimously by the MIT faculty, which means that both faculty members when came to the faculty meeting voted for it. (laughter) .
But nonetheless, it's a nice statement. Harvard has a similar policy that was passed unanimously. This are now about 15 places that have passed sux policies. A compute ace ago action you might want to do is go back to your university and start talking about the possibility of doing this and link it to the thing that you all see for real which is that little letter you're getting from the libraries every year that says can we cancel subscriptions to this journal? You've all gotten that? That's what's driving in. And the question is are you going to do anything about it other than sit and whine that journal prices are too high.
Okay, let me start pulling back to the initial things. There's a fight against this. This is not without opposition. Because at the end of the day, computational knowledge, computational thinking, computational values are powerful and they threaten people. There are people who are being threatened by this. So, if you look at Elziv rer for example there's terms of author agreement which says among other things that you can post copies of these prepublication things on a personal Web site and then in 2010Elziver changed the language. They said you can publish them on a perm Web site except if you're one of these institutions that has an open access mandate. So it turns out that me, as an MIT faculty member, if I publish with Elziver, I actually have fewer rights to my paper or what used to be my papers than places that people with places that don't -- so people at MIT and Harvard and Stanford school of education and University of Kansas actually have fewer rights because of this change in Elziver policy and it is very hard to view that as anything other than a really blatant attempt to start influencing university policies.
But, of course, university politics are small change compared with real politics. So probably several of you have heard about the research works act that was before Congress that was introduced in December that basically said it is a prohibition against any federal law that would mandate any kind of open access agreement on federally funded research like the NIH agreement that you might know about.
So that's kind of interesting. Where does Congress -- how is it that Congress suddenly thinks about this? And makes a law, a specific anti-open access law?
Well,, you know, guess who's lobbying? Right? So this law basically like most laws that come are not written by Congress, they're written by lob yiforts. This is a specific law that was pend by the publishing industry. And here you have a quote from Alicia white from Elziver saying, of course, we're against -- we're doing this because -- because, because why? We're protecting those university authors from being forced to put their stuff into open access. Really, they're protecting your rights, your rights, this is what this is protecting. And we're against government regulation. Everybody's against government regulation. So as I put in the slide, so there's good news here as I was preparing this lecture, some news came out on Monday where Elziver basically dropped its support for the research works act and then the two members of Congress, a couple hours after that, literally hours after that, the two members of Congress who had introduced the bill withdrew the bill and are now saying well, we're still against government regulation but that particular act is not especially a good idea. So there's good news still.
So far I've given a talk that's a little bit about general academic values and open access and academic freedom. But let me come back to we have a special role in this. Because there's a part that's not about open access in school. And there's a part that's not about library budgets are being driven through the roof. But there's a part that relates to us. There's another part of these establisher agreements that has to do with when your library licensing the academic literature, they're restricted in certain things and in particular here's something from springer and from ProQuest. There is a prohibition in these libraries against data mining. So it is against the contract that your library signs with the publishers to do any kind of data mining this work. Why do we care about that? Here's one from Elziver. In the library agreements this is not an agreement you see with the awnl author, this is the agreement your university library signs when it licenses works from Elziver. There's a specific prohibition against doing exactly the kind of thing that we as computer scientist educators recognize is the thing that's going to make this literature take the next step. Specific prohibition against that.
And Elziver, of course, is not dumb. They have a wonderful wonderful service that libraries can subscribe to. It has a pretty limited API that will allow you to do a limited kind of mining and searching against it. But are you going to it's great and a lot of people will like it but it's a walled garden. It says we're going to take this literature that we have collected. We're going to put it in a walled garden that is under our control so that we not only get the value of it. But we get to say what happens to it. It is not a generative platform. Remember at the very beginning I talked about this work that started gosh this week using the Google Ngram viewer to work on the particle physics literature. Why would that happen? That's because Paul greensburg who had been accumulating this open access archive of the particle literature had an open access archive. He couldn't -- the only -- right? The only reason he's able to do this is that it's open access. Doing this -- he couldn't do this with the university libraries because it would violate their agreement with all the publishers. So what you're seeing is a decline of generativity.
That was a really long example and what I'm doing is following the advice of that wonderful talk yesterday by Fred Brooks who said go into a deep example before you start generalizing.
So let me go back now and generalize and put this in a broader content and broader context that has to do with us as computer science educators. Generativity, this is as far as I'm aware comes from a marvelous book flished in 2008 by Jonathan Zitr an at har shard law school "the future of the Internet and how to stop it" one of the great titles of the world and what this book is about is the process of generativity. A generative platform is when -- generative technologies are ones that end up being able to be used for things much, much broader than the designers anticipated. And this book is really about two marvelously important generative platforms, one being the Internet -- because what's the important thing about the Internet? What's important is the Internet is that pretty much anybody can connect to any Web site. If you want to link to something, put a link on the HTML page. That's the precious key thing in the notion of Internet arc deck tour and web architecture. So the Internet is generative. The other thing that's been historically generative is the PC. Because forever we make jokes about being -- about Microsoft being a monopolist and anti-open source and all that stuff which is completely true, it has never been the case that you needed Redmond's permission in order to write and distribute a program. That has never been true before. And as a result the PC literature itself was generative. And the history of these two factors of generativity are responsible for so much of what we see in the information technology explosion. So Jonathan was writing that in 2008.
Last month he was writing this: That the PC is dead. What's he talking about? What's he saying? He's warning us that if we start accepting walled gardens in these technologies, we're going to end up giving control of this to the gardeners. And this whole notion of generativity and empowerment is going to become something unimaginably less than what it could have been.
What I mean by this, right, you don't need Redmond's permission to go distribute a software for the PC. What it becoming? It's becoming this. It's becoming the apps market. Becoming the iPhone, where you do need Apple's permission, you don't need it legally but you don't have access to the distribution channels. So what we're saying -- and now I'm really back talking about us as computer science educators -- we're seeing a cycle where the network effects lead to consolidation of the distribution channels, lead to various players for good or -- whatever their intent, end up being in control of it and lead to a decline of generativity. So the question that I want us to ask ourselves is as we think about computational thinking and computational values and the actions we might do, do we believe, care about the fact that the platforms that our students -- our current students we're teaching right now, that the platform our students are going to be using in their career and even in their careers, gosh, tomorrow, three years from now are going to be generative? That they're going to have the same benefits that we all did growing up in the 80s, in the 70s, 80s, 90s in a technology that was empowering and beautiful to us because it was generative. Are we losing that? Let me show you a perfect example. There's a wonderful marvelous kid friendly programming language that Apple does not allow in the iPhone store, everybody know what it is? You probably heard of it. It's called scratch. And you can't get scratch in the iPhone stores. Why? Does Apple have something specifically -- are they angry at that cat or something? Probably not. What this is collateral damage in Apple's fight against adobe to not allow interpreters in apps in the iPhone store. And scratch has an interpreter in it. So it gets kicked out and once a policy gets in, you can't put it back in. So here's a consequence. So here's the iconic beautiful piece of introducing kids to computational thinking, probably three workshops at this conference about scratch and computational thinking, and you can't get it in the iPhone store.
Or it's going to be up to Apple whether you can get it in the iPhone store and they say no.
And so in particular what I've been asking myself, just to sort of bring it to an end and bring it home, I've been asking myself will the mobile computing end up being generative? Because almost nobody is talking about gee, I ought to be able as a kid or as anybody to be able to first of all, make some kind of mobile app and secondly, get access to a generative empowering distribution platform. So one of the things -- so one of the tremendously, tremendously pieces of good fortune I had over the past couple of years was the opportunity to be a visiting faculty member at Google and propose that Google create some software called app inventor for Android. And I had even wonderful outstanding good fortune to have some remarkable wonderful visionary talented impressive Google engineers, there's Mark freedman and Liz loony who are -- I've been teaching software engineering for a long time and I got the chance to work inside Google and see people and it really is true what they say. These folks are really good.
But in any case what we created is something called app inventor. I'll just spend a second. Sort of a server -- a thing that lives in the cloud. You sit in your web browser and you compose -- talk in a language. The language is influenced by scratch and precursors to scratch where you move around blocks and you can generate an app that works on your phone or on your simulator. Really briefly, you drag some components to something. And here I've tried to button component and it shows up on the phone and I said my button should look like my cat and then you switch over into a thing that those of you who look at scratch or BYOB will recognize as a box programming language, when I press the button, the cat should meow and not that but the cat should look at the address provider and now I get an app when I press the button, the cat meows and tells me where wha his address is. We started something at MIT called the center for mobile learning.
And that's a joint enterprise again cycling back to the very beginnings, it's run by me, Mitch Reznick who is the inventor of scratch and Eric, the inventor of star logo, the next generation is currently doing things on inventive reality games and we'll be talking about that more this afternoon.
So that kind of brings it to an end. I hope this kind of made a little bit of sense of how it fits together. But I want to -- but I really want to leave you with this. It's the thought that we who teach computing, who dedicated our careers to bring that sense of empowerment and beauty to our students know something very special. We have this spark of inspiration about how one should relate to the information environment and a believe that that kind of inspiration and power and generativity should be available to everyone. And let's not forget it and let's not forget that those beliefs are powerful. They really are. And they have powerful enemies. And it takes solid vision, not only about how I'm going to make this lesson to get across the idea of how I might do better caching in my computer memory to students but the values about why. And I hope we don't forget that. And I hope that we all will live in a world where those of us who were so inspired and empowered as we came to this discipline let's all work that that same world and those opportunities are available to our students. So thank you.