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interviewer: today isaugust 23, 2011. i'm chris boebel. as part of the mit150 infinitehistory project, we're talking with professor hal abelson. professor abelson is the classof 1922 professor of electrical engineering andcomputer science at mit. he holds an ab degree fromprinceton university and a phd degree in mathematicsfrom mit.

in 1992, abelson was designatedas one of mit's six inaugural macvicarfaculty fellows. professor abelson isco-director of the mit-microsoft icampus researchalliance in educational technology. he's co-chair of the mitcouncil on educational technology. and he serves on thesteering committee of the hp-mit alliance.

he has played key roles infostering mit institutional initiatives such as mitopencourseware and dspace. hal, thanks very much fortaking the time-- abelson: sure. interviewer: --to talk today. so let's start atthe beginning. abelson: the beginning? interviewer: the beginning. just start by telling me alittle bit about where you

grew up and the early years? abelson: so the real earlyyears, i grew up on a chicken farm in central new jersey. my parents worked on the farm. my father later went and workedin the post office. i was the first one in myfamily to go to college, although my parents were alwaysvery, very interested in education. my parents liked music,education.

i had an uncle who sort of wasthe college person, who worked for exxon and had a highlevel position there. so we always cared a lotabout education. i'm not quite sure where iglommed onto math and science. i remember when i was i guess12 or 13, i decided i wanted to be a physicist,mostly because i think i liked the word. but i didn't knowwhat that was. i did sort of okay in school.

when i talk to kids these days,i remind them that when i was their age in seventh oreighth grade, i was getting d's in mathematics. in fact, like a lot of peoplewho end up going into computers, we are really badat doing arithmetic. someone once said the reasona lot of people go into computers is to makeup for their own handicaps in doing that. so i wasn't particularlygood in any of those

subjects early on. and then about the time i gotin high school, i started being good at it. one of the things the schooldid, they hired somebody to help me learn calculus becauseof course our school did nothing like that. and i don't know, sort of grewa lot of interest in math and science from there. so at some point i saidgee, i don't want to

be a physicist anymore. i want to be a mathematicianbecause i guess that word sounded better. and then i got into princetonon a scholarship, which was nice because my family couldnever have afforded anything like that. and did pretty wellat princeton. started getting interestedin a subject called algebraic topology.

and then got into mit graduateschool on that. and ended up coming to graduateschool at mit mostly because my wife and i werelooking for places we could both go. we weren't married then, butshe was looking for a place where she could go. she got into bu's schoolof social work. i got into mit. mit also had a draftdeferment.

so back in ancient days, one ofthe things that you wanted to do was if you were worriedthat getting drafted to go to the vietnam war, so mit didsomething where i think because i was teaching orsomething like that, there was a category of draft defermentyou could get. so we ended up coming to mit. and mit was just absolutelyan fascinating place. one of the nicest things, wheni first showed up at mit, we lived in westgate.

and one of the great memoriesthat we had of being in westgate was looking down overthe field and at the other end of the field, seeing the teargas on mass ave. because that was the time when evenmit students were protesting stuff. they were protesting, foranybody who remembers, draper labs used to be calledthe institute labs. and there was a protest abouthow is it that on the mit campus, there was classifiedresearch related to the

vietnam war? it was just sort of wonderful. just marvelous to be here andlook through this thing. and what do i remember of mit? i remember going up to the dooron 77 mass ave. and gosh, they were automatic doors. and coming from princeton,which is an ivy covered-- it's the last thing in theworld you would ever imagine like that.

and then there were theselong, long halls. and i always had these visionsof getting on roller skates and going down the hallsthese automatic doors. it was just a wild place. it was all one building. i didn't know quite whatto make of it. but then early on, it could havebeen a couple of weeks after i got here, the studentsfor a democratic society, if anyone remembers that from the'60s, that was the campus

activist organization. it took over the president'soffice. and they did this great thing. they had open house at thepresident's office. and they were sitting therereplaying the tapes so they could see what was typed on theelectric typewriters in president howard johnson'soffice. and they held open house. and i said, hey, i'm anew graduate student.

i'm never in my life, ever goingto be able to walk into the mit's president's office. so let me go sit aroundand see what's in the president's office. so we walk in. and there were a bunch ofstudents kind of sitting on the floor of the president'soffice. and i see a guy that i'd beento high school with, who i knew had gone to mit, but we'dhad no contact since then.

and i went up to himand said hi. gee, hi, ronnie. this is sort of really nice. and he says, whatare you doing? and i said, i'm a newgraduate student. i'm looking for what to do. what's interesting todo around here? and he said, oh, why don't yougo over to the artificial intelligence lab.

i hear they're doinginteresting stuff. so i wandered over there andtalked to some people. and that's essentially how i gotinto computer science and ai and all the stuffi'm doing now. and i like to tell that storyto students who worry about what they're going to dowhen they grow up. because i like to tell themit will be random, and you have no idea. but at some point, some totallyrandom thing will

happen that will have atremendous influence. so don't worry aboutit too much. interviewer: so backing up forjust a moment, had you done work in computer science beforethat at princeton, or even previously? how did you first-- abelson: yeah. at princeton i did-- well, there sort of wasn't acomputer science major then.

in fact, i'm not even surethere was one at mit when i showed up. but at princeton, a bunchof us worked in the computer center. and the princeton computercenter had an ibm-- i think a 7.090 or 7.10. it got one of the first 3.60s. and they were workingon this very weird thing called time sharing.

and a bunch of us went aroundand messed around with that and did what most of princetonconsidered to be a totally worthless, stupid thing withcomputers, which is actually using it for text processing. because everyone knew that whatcomputers were really for were solving big complicatedequations. and the computer center usedto take down the system a couple of hours each week andlet those of us who wanted to screw around and wastetime, play with this

text editing thing. get tremendous complaints fromthe astrophysics department because people hadto stop trying to solve on science equations. so i became one of thepeople who were messing around with that. and i became a little bit of aconsultant, an undergraduate consultant in the computersystem, teaching people to migrate their programs fromfortran to a language that ibm

and a couple of other placeswere pushing then called pl/1, a very modest name, programminglanguage 1. and this was supposed to be thebe all and end all of the new computer stuff. and there was a big move to sayyou should translate all your programs into pl/1. so i became one of what wascalled the pl/1 kids and would consult with faculty in theother departments about how to modify their programs.

so i had some stuffin computing and i knew about that. i knew very little about whati actually went into at mit. but it was a background incomputers, enough to walk into the ai lab and do interestingthings. interviewer: but at the timeyou came to mit, initially there was not a sensethat you would be moving in that direction? abelson: no, i was inthe math department.

and i was a graduate student inthe math department, became an instructor in the mathdepartment after that, and only moved into computing lateron because some of the work i was doing in topologywas related to distributed computing. and then sort of the topologypart of it atrophied and the computing part of it grew. and eventually when intocomputer science. interviewer: so you mentionedthe ai lab.

talk a bit more about workingthere and also you worked with seymour papert in the logolab as well, right? abelson: well, that's actuallyhow i started in the ai lab. for some reason i went-- there was an early logopresentation called i think teaching children thinking,which was in 26-100. and it was this big thing whereseymour papert and his assistant for many years,cynthia solomon, talked about the logo computer language andshowed the logo turtle.

and i looked at it and itwas pretty fascinating. and pretty wild. i remember later on reading areport from a journalist who's been there. and her mind was just blownabout this notion that children should do theseweird robot things. and i remember her saying, ilooked at this thing and i thought these peoplewere witches. but anyway, i thought they werecool, whether they were

witches or not. and i walked over to theai lab, looking for something to do. and walked into the elevator. and then elevator stopped atone of the floors and then seymour got in. and i said, hi, ilike your stuff. i'm a new graduate student. can i work for you?

and he said, yeah. and that's how i got intothis whole business. so another bunch ofrandom events. interviewer: so you've talked alittle bit about what it was like coming to mit in the late1960s, what your impression was of the campus. but give me a little bit moreinformation about sort of the culture and the environmentat that time. i mean obviously it differed asyou've said from princeton

and was unlike otherthings you'd seen. abelson: well to me, itwas really strange. i mean mit is such a bigcomplicated place. i've often thought that well,after being here about 20 years i finally got the abilityto think of the place as a whole place. and i just don't even know howit's possible to do that because there are just so manythings going on and it's so complicated.

but my impression from princetonis that it was very strange and very regimented. so i remember hearing about theexperimental study group. so what people told me about theexperimental study group was that it was a place whereyou could learn on your own and do stuff that'sindependently and it was very open. and i remember going overthat, because i had some friends who were in the esg.

so what do you do here? what do you do that'sindependent? and they said something like,well we get to take the standard course curriculum,but we get to study it by ourselves. and i just remember breakingdown laughing. i said, that's this place'sidea of what independent learning is? because i'd been in a programat princeton, a very '60s

program, i think even princetonstop doing it, where they admitted you. and they said hey, you'rea bunch of smart people. you have no requirements. you had departmentrequirements. but the rest of the time,princeton's a big place, take what you want. and all of the standard thingsyou'd call distribution requirements or universityrequirements are just

abolished for you. some of us totallyexploited it. some of us had a great time. i ended up with a couple offriends essentially living as graduate students in themath department. but coming from there to mit,it was this sense of being regimented and precise. later i've come toidentify that as an engineering culture.

i see the same thing happeningat google, because i've been spending time at google. so you see this cultureand you love it. i mean i just love engineer'sculture. i'm an engineer and i do that. but one of the characteristicsof an engineer's culture is you sort of sit and you say,what's the problem, what are you're trying to do? and then about three secondslater you say

okay, what's the solution? and you think for abouttwo minutes and you figure out the solution. and then you just drive to thatsolution as fast you can. and looking back, i recognizethat's how i reacted to mit. so there was no sense thatthe requirements were wrong or any of that. it was just we figured outthis is the way to do it. and now we are just goingto drive to that as

effectively as we can. and mit's kind of like that. and there are wonderfulparts about that. and there are sort ofbad part of that. interviewer: tell me a bitmore about working with seymour papert. what was that like? abelson: well, seymourwas, is amazing. so i guess people know thattragically he was very

severely injured in vietnam. and his brain wasvery affected. and he's under rehabilitationnow. but seymour was just absolutelyamazing-- i mean his childlike senseof wonder at learning. and what seymour reallyis about is learning. so people talk about computingand people talk about math. but with seymour you are justsurrounded by this joy of being able to learn.

so it's not just mathand things. it's things like, he taughthimself when we were there how to work on the bongo board. there's some old ai lab historictapes of seymour doing the bongo board. and what he loved was to explainto people how you thought about how to balanceon the bongo board. he also did it with juggling. so he sort of hada tremendous--

teaching people to juggle. and his idea was that youcould think about that. there was a method for thinkingabout how you juggle. so this thing that looked likea very complicated thing that a circus person was doing, italmost magic, you could actually teach it. and everything he did wasinfused with that. i remember going to visithim in maine. and he wrote this map.

and the map, you could tell thathe enjoyed writing the directions on this map ina way that people would understand them. and of course that went overinto math and science. so he had exactly the samephilosophy that learning about math and science isn't magic. there's a deliberate, in hisway, procedural way of thinking about knowledgeand about learning. another critical part of thatis the notion of debugging.

so there's this idea thatyou do something, and you make a mistake. and he would always totallyemphasize that mistakes are wonderful. bugs are just great because thatallows you to go back and analyze and think about stuff. and all of that influence wentnot only in my own work in education, but also in thecomputer science work that gerry sussman and i did.

there's this thing calledthe procedural explanation of knowledge. one critical thing in teachingpeople ideas, whether in computer science or anything,is to give them names and to use those names and things. and that goes right through allof our work in the scheme programming language and ourwork in making mit's first computer science course. it goes absolutely, directlyback to seymour.

interviewer: were there otherkey mentors or professors that influenced your development,your intellectual or your professional developmentas a graduate student. abelson: oh well, sure. i mean i wasn't a graduatestudent in computer science. i didn't work for seymour asa research instructor. my research was actually inmathematics under dennis sullivan, who is a very, veryfamous topologist, who was in the math department atmit in those days.

and again, he was a littlebit different. dennis was one of these mathematicians who's just magic. you look at this thing and yousay how could this guy possibly have ever thoughtabout this stuff? and he was just an enormousinfluence about-- just sort of this intellectualexcellence where the stuff springs from nowhere. and you're just inspiredthat way.

interviewer: so tell me a littlebit more about your professional path frommathematics to computer science and from gettinga phd at mit to being a professor at mit? abelson: oh, sure. well when i got a phd,i was in the math department doing topology. got an appointmentas an instructor. but then because i was workingin logo, mit started something

in the mid-'70s called thedivision for study in research and education. and it had a couple ofkey pieces to it. there were three leaders. one was ben snyder, who wrotea very famous book at mit called the hidden curriculum,which is all about how surviving at mit is a processof constant triage. and students at mit haveto learn that. one's don schon, who was in thesloan school, who was very

famous for his theories ofknowledge or ideas of espoused knowledge and howyou do things. and the third one which wasseymour doing logo. so i became part of the divisionfor study in research got a joint appointmentin math and dsre. and that's where we sort ofreally started to do logo work as sort of real mit researchkind of stuff. but then eventually whathappens, mit decided to close down dsre.

i was sort of too junior then tounderstand or even be aware of the politics behind that. but in any case, mit decidedto close it down. and then i moved into theelectrical engineering computer science department,kind of on the basis of the logo work and the basis ofthe fact that i was doing distributed computing. and that's sort of wherei've been sitting. interviewer: so tell me a bitmore about the early logo work

and your work in distributedcomputing and how that has sort of influenced yourresearch path since? abelson: well, i don't actuallythink about logo and distributed computingtogether very much. interviewer: well, we can treatit separately i suppose. abelson: other than they kind ofboth end up being a vision of computing and being formalabout it and things. the logo work was asi said, magic. it is really hard rightnow to go back.

we're talking a dozen yearsbefore the personal computer. what we used to say in logo isoh my god, if a computer could just cost $10,000, that would revolutionize all of education. because what we were doing isthese were million machines, a million dollars in1968 dollars. they were sitting in theartificial intelligence lab, doing the world's very best,fanciest research an artificial intelligence.

and we were hooking them up overphone lines to be used by sixth graders in lexington,massachusetts. and just a totallyoutrageous thing. one my first projects as agraduate student was working on a remote display that youcould hook up that could sit in lexington and moveover a phone line. and so students could write whatwas effectively the first logo turtle and draw designson this graphics display. so that was like my first jobas a graduate student,

implementing that. but it was so off scale. just the very idea that acomputer would be something that a kid could use. we take it so it for grantednow that it's almost impossible to put yourselfin that mindset. so most people thought we werecrazy, because i mean what a weird thing. why could a computer ever besomething that would be

relevant to a kid, much lessprogramming it or anything? and it was a mixture of whathappened in the ai lab. every couple of weeks somebodywould run in off the street saying, i want tosee the robots. you're making robots. i want to come see them. and ai lab was just a wonderfulmixture of that. so it was run by seymour papertand of course marvin minsky, who are just twocompletely brilliant people

with i think a real sense offaith, in that if you're surrounded by a lot of smartpeople and you give them a lot of freedom and your job isreally to inspire people, it will do great things. and the ai lab was justinfused with that. there was just a tremendoussense of community among the ai researchers, which was partlytrue because it was pretty small. one of the things that'shappened more recently is that

merged with the lab forcomputer science. and it doesn't have that samereal sense of community and flexibility. but the original ai lab, therehave been a much of books written about it, all sorts ofthings emerged from that. the other thing that emergedfrom that, that maybe you want to talk about later is richardsolomon and the whole free software movement, which thesedays is better known as the open source movement.

but that was a thing-- i mean in a deep sense it hadto do with computer science, but not obviously. but it's a whole kind ofphilosophy that grew out of this sense that technology isfundamentally a data community and fundamentally about a wholebunch of inspired people sharing and building oneach other's work. and that of course goes way pastsoftware into things like creative commons and lots ofthe stuff that we see now.

but it came out of thatgerm of sharing around a technology community. interviewer: yeah, i want todefinitely in a little bit explore some of these broaderideas in their current form. but let's talk a bit about thatculture of sharing and of open networks withinmit at that point. i mean i've read that obviouslythere's a whole sort of different landscapeof security and passwords or lack thereof.

but just describe theenvironment a bit more at that time and how obviouslyit had effects later. abelson: well rememberfor thinking about now, the internet-- it wasn't an internet then-- thearpanet was a small place. and it really was avery small, very, very homogeneous place. i like to tell people i've hadmy email address since i kind of knew all of the people thati could have send email to.

i mean it's been written a lotthat people who originally designed the internet saidthey just sort of did not design the internet architectureto think that there would be badguys out there. because they knewall the people. all the people were like them. and that reflected overin passwords. i remember there was one sortof dark day when the people from arpa said, you need to putpasswords on your accounts

because they're onthe network. and for security, youneed to do that. and a whole bunch of us werejust convinced this was a horrible idea. i mean what a terrible ideathat you'd have to put a password in an account andpeople could get into it. i remember richard stallmanreacted to this by making his password rms, whichwas initials. so just jumping ahead a littlebit, if you move about 10, 12

years later, my daughter, whenshe was about oh 14, introduced me to what becameknown as muds or multiplayer games on the internet. i had no idea thisthing existed. and i was introduced to thisby my, what she then, she probably was maybe about 13. and i come home and she saysdaddy, do you know there's this thing on the computer thatall kids in the whole world can use?

and i say, gosh no. and she says, i'll show you. and she says you have todial this phone number. so she starts dialingthis phone number. and i say, oh my god, that'smy lab at mit. that's the terminus serverto my lab at mit. and she says yeah, youhave this thing. and it types out this funnystar or something. and now i'm supposed to typer-m-s. and i say, oh my god,

you're typing stallman'spassword to get into the system. and she goes from that andstarts up playing this game. and it was great. she had no idea thatthis was mit. she had no idea whatrms meant. but there were kids all over theworld who were doing this. and that's a little bit of thespirit of sharing and openness and delight that comesfrom that.

that's just reallyhard to do now. because again, the network is amuch less homogeneous place than it used to be. but that's a little bit ofwhat that ai lab kind of spirit i remember, just togive you another little anecdote about that,that's fun. i don't know if you'veinterviewed joel moses? interviewer: not personally,but yeah. abelson: so joel moses at thattime was the head of the

symbolic mathematics project. that's really the great thingthat he did, before becoming provost, sort of inventingsymbolic mathematics. and there was a whole bigdispute between him and one of his ex-students who hadgone to berkeley. and there was a dispute aboutwho should get access to this maxima program and should it belicensed and not licensed. and there was a fairly heatedemail exchange that went between joel and rich fateman.

and of course, everyone couldread everybody else's email at that time. and they decided that peoplein the lab were wasting so much time reading joel's emailthat they simply translated all of joel's email tomessage of the day. so you all saw it whenyou logged on. and that's a little bit again,the sense of playfulness and openness and we're all part ofthis big community and the computer system is a wayof empowering that.

and i do believe that had awhole lot to do especially with the developmentof time sharing. in a sense sort of bob fano andcorby corbato, when they started the time sharingproject, it was sort of about but pretty soon they realizedreally what they'd done is create a new kindof community. and to their credit theyrecognized that very, very early and pushed the senseof gee, there's a thing like community.

there is an informationcommunity. mit was one the first placesthat really did that in a conscious way. and again, this all comesout of the same kind of culture of openness. interviewer: yeah, we'll returnto the whole question of open networks, opensource a bit later. i want to turn a little bit ina different direction and ask a bit about your interest andprofessional development of

teaching computer science, ofthe development of 6.001 and also your work with geraldsussman and the book. and maybe, i don't know if thisis a productive way of leading into it, butit's a question i'm really curious about. you mentioned very early on thatwhen you were growing up, you were bad at arithmetic, butfound out later that you were good at math. and i think that'svery fascinating.

how does one think about math ina way that makes that true? i mean they're impossible thatcould be bad at arithmetic, but good at math. abelson: i don't know. i don't view arithmetic ashaving very much to do with math in fact. and i think there area lot of people in kind of the same boat. again, there's theories thatpeople who go into these

developmental fields are doingit in some sense to make up for their own deficits,to try them. so i sort of view itkind of that way. but again, i've always beeninterested in puzzling out things and explaining things. i wasn't very much interestedin teaching until i, gosh, until i got to mit in fact. but it was mostly explainingthings to myself. being in a couple of very goodsummer high school programs,

one at university of notre dame,which has since moved to ohio state, which had a long,long, long track record of inspiring peoplein mathematics. one at cornell, in physics. so that's another kind ofeducational link that i was exposed to. and later, my colleague andydisessa and i ran that kind of summer high school program atmit around computer science and logo and teaching things.

so i've been interested ineducation kind of from that perspective. i've also played around withcomputers in education. one of the things i did in themath department was i was teaching linear algebra. and i think just for the heckof it, i did what must have been one of the very first mitcomputer exercises where students used the multicscomputer system in those days to do some exercise at the endof the day about matrices.

now i didn't know whati was doing. and it wasn't particularly goodand wasn't particularly successful. but it was kind of foray intosaying, gosh these mit computers might actuallyget used in courses. not much of that happened for along time after that though. interviewer: thinking aboutteaching computer science specifically, can you talk abit about the structure and interpretation of computerprograms and what that grew

out of and what the sort offundamental concepts are behind your approach? abelson: so gerry sussman andi, i think were really privileged in that we wrote abook that really was able to draw on that whole of a 20-yearhistory of how mit and that whole ai culture thoughtabout computing. and it goes directly back toagain seymour papert and marvin minsky. and it really has to do with--

what's the phrase we used-- acomputer program is a way of expressing ideas andcommunicating ideas, and only incidentally about gettinga machine to do stuff. that is straight out of-- i don't think seymour usedthose words, but that's straight out of thelogo philosophy of we're teaching you-- like i talked aboutjuggling before. this really is, what's theprocedure for how you juggle?

and critical in being able todo that is having the right set of words and having theright descriptive framework for saying things like that. and so the key idea in structureand interpretation is what we ended up callingthe linguistic approach to programming design, which saysif i would like to do some very complicated thing, one ofthe critical tasks is picking the right descriptive frameworkfor saying that. so there is a complete blend.

i think somewhere in that bookwe wrote that when you make a complicated program, you'reactually designing a special purpose computer languageto solve a problem. and it comes through inlots and lots of ways. so it goes back i think to theai culture, which has the property that you don't quiteknow what problem you're solving because these thingsare really complicated. it's not as if someone sayscompute the total payment on this mortgage where youknow exactly what

you're going to do. rather it says, you want to bemucking around in this area to solve this problem and lots andlots and lots and lots of similar problems. and that permeates both thedesign of the book and the actual programming technologythat people use. so the style of programminglanguages that go back to lisp is really sort of muddier. it's not a very precisekind of thing.

you make ways of programmingthings where you're solving not just one problembut a whole family of problems in that. and again, it goes back to very,very technical things, like lisp is a very goodlanguage for creating other computer languages. because when you're programmingin lisp, you actually have the mentality ofgosh, i'm actually creating some special purpose language tosolve not just one problem,

but lots of them. and that's the criticalidea in structure and interpretation. i mean we can't takecredit for that. we were just blessed that therewas a whole tradition of 20 years of really deep thinkingat mit and a couple of other similar places. and we sort of got to bethe people who got to put that in the book.

and it's had enormous influence,but it's not because of us, it's because thetremendous power of those ideas and the communitiesthat they came from. interviewer: so moving beyondthose communities that the book and that thought processcame out of, did you encounter resistance, maybe that's notthe right word, maybe misunderstanding-- people who were focusedon the syntax? abelson: so we publishedthis with mit press.

and mit press sent itout for reviews. and the first reviewcame back. and i'll never forget. it said, quote, the question is,is in mit press publishing this book going to advance orset back computer science? so there was a lot of resistanceto this because it's just very different. and there's a lot of people whoreally don't believe in that approach, who really dothink it's the wrong thing.

because again, it's this notionof you don't actually focus on solving this problemvery, very, very precisely. there's a whole movementin computer science, a tremendously respectable one,and it says a program is like the proof of a mathematicaltheorem. and there are people who doprove things about programs. that in some sense is themainstream almost. whereas we're saying well, a programis sort of like a language. like you can saylots of things.

and i don't imagine i'm goingto prove everything i'm going to say. it's just that the great thingis i get to see all these different things. so we've had a lot of influence,but i wouldn't even say that we're mainstream,even now. interviewer: from my limitedexperience when i think back to my computer programmingclasses, it was more like the mathematical theorem approach.

yeah. abelson: exactly right. it is. interviewer: so talk about 6.001and the development of that class, which is obviouslyclosely related to the book, right? abelson: gosh. so the other person who reallydeserves enormous credit for this is bob fano.

there was a tradition of, whatwas the first mit computer science course? there was one taught bymike dertouzos and steve ward for awhile. but when i got involvedwith this, bob fano was teaching this. it was called 6.035. and what was it called? i think it might have beencalled structure and

interpretation of computerlanguages. and it was very focused on,here's this kind of language. the language then wasalgol people used. and then it did a littlebit of lisp. and it was kind ofan okay course. mostly famous because itwas the first course. but fano did saythe key thing. so i talked about what you'redoing is making a language and how you make languagesto make languages.

the technical term for thatis an interpreter. so an interpreter is somethingthat effectively takes the description of a language andlets the computer effectively speak that language. and fano was very-- i mean he would say thisin his lectures. i don't think any of thestudents got it. i didn't get it until like thethird time through, where he sort of said the really, reallykey thing is that you

build up complexity byconstructing an interpreter. and again, that's the coreidea of 6.001, said in a slightly different way. so he had an enormous, enormousinfluence on us, but also more directly. so about this time, there was atradition in the electrical engineering computer sciencedepartment of when the department did the transitionfrom kind of power engineering to signals engineering in thelate '50s, led by people like

ernie guillemin and those sortlegends at mit, there was a very, very influential series oftextbooks that came out, i think in the late '50s, early'60s, that almost sort of set the academic marker for thefield of electrical engineering. so when we were there in thein the late '70s and very beginning of the '80s, joelmoses and gerry wilson wanted to do that again. so there was this notion thatthere would be a series of new

courses and new books that thedepartment would put out. and then what was going tobe the computing one? so fano basically backed thatgerry and i would do the computing one and do thecomputing course. and again, there was a lot ofa lot of controversy there because people didn'tbelieve it. fano was sort of the power inthe department who really made it possible for us to do that. gerry and i sort of happenedinto this.

so we were sort of lucky. and just very, very fortunatethat there were some smart people backing us. interviewer: how hasintroductory curriculum in ecs changed since that time? i mean clearly it's-- abelson: oh, it'schanged a lot. interviewer: yeah. people keep using thephrase bittersweet.

it's changed in style. so what happened in thedepartment is the department kind of decided that the waystudents get introduced into the department should becomemore horizontal and less vertical, by which i mean whenyou go into the department before the new curriculum, therewere a bunch of very intellectually deep courses. so 6.001 really is a deepcourse in software and then the idea was well, youshouldn't actually do that

because if students want tothink about what they want to major in, they ought toget an experience that's a lot more broad. so they should learn not onlyabout software, but something about circuits and somethingabout signal processing and all that. so 6.001 sort of didn'tfit into that world. i sort was on the committee. i had this funny feeling.

i sort of loved the course. but i also had thisfeeling that the course needed to change. and both gerry and i felt thatas long as we were part of it, it wasn't going to change. and in fact we consciouslygot out of it. we had an official, what youcall passing of the baton ceremony in one of the lectureswhere bob fano was there as the originator of this,who let us do 6.001.

and then eric grimson andduane boning were there. they were going totake it over. and we kind of officiallypassed the baton. and we said we nowdid this in front of 350 student witnesses. we are never going to teachthis course again. the department can't ask us. but then what happened is evenafter we got out of it, the course didn't change as much.

and we can flatter ourselves andsay well, the ideas were just really great. but sometimes you just needa kick in the pants to go someplace else. so this new departmentcurriculum structure turned out to be the kickin the pants. and so i was part of the group,along with leslie kaelbling and jacob white andtomas lozano-perez, who sort of designed sort of the newcourse, which consciously was

not about 6.001. but a lot of the biggestthemes of 6.001 about extraction and modularity andthe way you express things, they carry over intothe new course. but the new course isalso doing robotics. and it's thinking thatsignal processing. and there's even some stuffabout circuits. so it's not a deep coursein that sense. and there's a lot of people whohave come through mit--

i don't want to take credit for6.001 and that, but i want to say it was a very deepexperience in how you think of software-- who criticized what we did. and they say theyreally miss it. they talk about their ownintellectual development as programmers. it was just profoundlyinfluenced by that kind of very--

we would sit in that classand talk about the philosophy sometimes. the new course does not dothat in the same way. on the other hand, you haveto sort of ask what's the population you're serving? and the fact that you talk tothe minority of students who really, really glommed on to ourway of thinking and they say, gee, we really wish mitwere still doing that. i don't know what the rightway of serving the most

students are. but in any case we're justdoing something rather different in motivation now. interviewer: so it's broader,but less deep. abelson: and very consciouslyless deep. interviewer: right. what are mit students like? i mean how do they respond tothe deep dive on the one hand or the sort of broad fire hoseon the other of having to deal

with all of these differentthings? abelson: i think youcan't generalize. right. there are certainly some, i'mgoing to say kind of the mathematical ones. so even though it's notmathematics, that kind of deep thing is a math kindof experience. and they really would ratherhave something that's more like the original 6.001.

but then there are a wholebunch of others who just want to-- i just want to understand thebreath of this field i'm getting into. i don't want to just becausei'm going to major in electrical engineering, haveto take a whole semester of this other stuff, mostof which is kind of irrelevant to me. so again, i don't have a goodsense of how the students are

feeling about the populationit's serving. because we did this other thingat the same time, which as far as students i thinkhas a much bigger impact. so there's a whole other streamwhich we haven't talked about at mit and activelearning, which comes from the stuff i've been doing with the educational technology council. but we made a radical, radicalchange in the style of the course, which was removingmost of the lectures.

so in the new course, the mainthing you do with your time is you work on a project. and there's a biggiant open lab. and the entire teaching staffof the course is present in this open lab. and there's kind of a pyramidalstructure where there are undergraduatelaboratory assistants, and each group of them is kind ofsupervised by a graduate student ta, and each group ofgraduate student ta's are

supervised by the actualcourse faculty. and we're all sort of mixingit up in the course and sitting there talking toindividual students. so rather than sitting inlecture, it's this very kind of open, interactiveproject-based thing. and that's such an enormouschange in style, that when you kind of ask the students well,do you like it more, how you react to it more, that's got todominate what we were doing in terms of content.

i want to actually ask a wholeset of questions on educational technology and thedevelopments you've been involved in. before turning to that, at therisk of asking to generalize again about mit students, isthere any way of talking about how or whether mit students havechanged over the course of your career? abelson: oh, god. you get the feeling that aboutevery three years there's a

new generation. so the main way mit studentshave changed i think is that they're more docile, asmuch as i hate to say. marilee jones, who wasadmissions director, actually thought about this a lot. remember in the '60s, mit tookhalf of its applicants. and now it takes what, 10percent, under 10 percent? and the students who end upgetting into mit are coming from a way more competitiveenvironment.

and in general, and intremendous exceptions, they have been successful by kind oflistening to their parents and listening to adults. and that's led to a tendencythat students i think have too much respect for what adults orlike faculty or something are saying. so there's really a sense ofjust kind of well they sort of know better and theyhave good things. and they go along it.

and there's not as much a senseof really challenging the system. now i don't know whether that'sa generational thing or whether it's this particularkind of influence at the top schools like mit. when's the last time yousaw students take over a building at mit? like i said, when i showed up atmit when i saw that happen, i said what incredibly anhealthy thing to happen.

and now we get upsetif students crack into an elevator. so there's really this senseof the students becoming-- i mean docile may be not quite--the wrong word-- but sort of too much respectfor what the institution is doing. and i sort of wish thatwould change. so that's sort of the bigchange that i see. interviewer: what price do wepay if the students are more

sort of quick to fall in lineor to do what's expected, rather than to push boundaries,i mean if any? abelson: i think its brilliance,its creativity, its achievement. when you think about any placeor mit, you sort of think in terms of the characters. who are the characters aroundthis place who give it tremendous flavor? maybe they're not the smartestpeople or doing

the greatest things. but they add spice to it. and you have to make room andjust really venerate those kind of people. and the more we worry aboutthose people are going to be doing something destructive orthey'll be wasting time or they'll be wasting resourcesor something, the more you lose that kind of spice. and i sort of hope mit neverloses that, although there's

just a lot of i don't quite wantto say regimentation, but it's just i'd saya little lack of tolerance for the oddballs. and we have to just treasurethe oddballs more. interviewer: so turning toeducational technology, you've been deeply involved in anynumber of initiatives and deployment of programs sinceyou've been at mit. abelson: since 1969. interviewer: yes.

tell me first of all where doesthat interest come from? why is it something that youhave spent so much time and energy and effort on? abelson: so part of it quitefrankly was this accident about going over to theai lab, meeting papert in the elevator. but again, also the sense thati think a lot of people have of the joy of explainingthings. and then the particularthing about--

well, for me it's computers andeducational technology. it's not just explainingthings. it's empowering peopleto do them. so even going back to theoriginal sort of logo turtle, which is the first thing iworked on, it's not that oh, it's sort of cool. you might think aboutgeometric designs. but i can make this world wherestudents can kind of explore and do things thatare both unexpected and

explainable. and that's sort of the root ofhow i think about educational but then there was a shift. i guess for me it came-- oh, it didn't come until thelate '80s or even the mid-'90s, where i startedthinking about the institution in educational technology. there's this whole other ethicwhich is how should an institution behavein that world?

so it's not only about how youeffectively transmit things to students or do them. it's what what's it mean foran institution to actually live in the world as aresponsible citizen? and i became really interestedin that. the person who for me embodiesthat and still embodies that is chuck vest. his wholepresidency was this sense of is mit acting as a responsible,ethical being in what it can do?

so i think about educationaltechnology in that way. it's not only how do we behavetowards our own student body, it's how do we behavetowards the world? so there is the sense that youoften here of mit, this sense that mit is a preciousworld resource. and i certainly believethat's true. and then the question is, withterms of education and educational technology, how doyou sort of step up to that obligation?

and part of it is howyou behave as a model for other places. so even going back to like thebook that gerry sussman and i wrote, there was always thissense that when you're writing a textbook at mit, it's notreally that they're going to be big sales about it, becausein our case it was gosh, we're teaching computer programmingand it's got calculus in chapter one. how could you use that?

but it's the sense of you'resort of writing it for the people who are going to writethe next round of books for everybody else. so a sense of peopleare watching and it matters what you do. and that's kind of a littlebit what's behind opencourseware. it's not just me. the original notion aboutopencourseware is we thought

that our audience in opencourseware were other educators. and the way that wholeinitiative was crafted where we said it's really importantthat we show all mit courses because what you'retrying to exhibit there, your model was-- i'm very consciously-- the education minister in somethird-world country would like to understand what that countryshould be doing about

chemical engineering. and then you sort of seedisplayed out before you is what mit, the top institutionin the world, thinks is and this is what was inour heads when we made of course it didn't quite workthat way because what we say, oh my god, they're all thesepeople who actually want to learn chemical engineering,who look at this stuff. and that should have beenobvious in hindsight because there are many more students inthe world than educators.

but we were surprised by that. but to get back to the originalethos of that, is you're setting yourself up asa model and you're trying to influence the influencers. and what you do matters. and that's not only a technicalobligation, it's an ethical obligation for howyou behave and how you think about it. and that's kind of how ithink about educational

technologies. it's with that sense of you'recreating a model. you have an obligation to sortof see that it works out right with respect to how you thinkthe world is evolving and how you think the internetis evolving. but much, much of mitis like that. it's a whole ethos of servicethat's really integral to how much of this community works. interviewer: tell me a bitmore about the genesis of

i know that when i first heardabout it at the time it was first announced, i guesscertainly not before then, it was somewhat from my verylimited perspective it seemed very shocking that mitwould do that. and i'm just really interestedin the genesis, the thought process institutionally, andalso for you personally? the only disappointment i haveabout opencourseware is that we announced it after theinternet bubble had peaked. again, if you go back to thelate '90s, right, 1998, 1999,

2000, there was this sense, ifyou read in the educational technology press or theeducation news, that universities were sittingon a gold mine. people talked about literallya $2 trillion economy coming out of universities, takingtheir course materials and putting them on the network. and i just loved it that in thatclimate, mit said hey, we're giving it away. education is being part of thecommunity of interacting and

doing research andbeing part of it. that's why you come to mit. that stuff you can watchon television, we just give that away. so i just loved saying that. now that came from kindof a different place. that was a wonderfullywell-crafted story that fit where we wanted tobe in that place. but in fact what happened isbob brown, who was provost

then, formed the council oneducational technology, which he and i ran togetherfor a couple years. and that came from a priorthing, where as chuck vest would say, he'd go around thecountry around 1997 and give these talks. and people would say, there'sthis internet. what's mit's going to do aboutit, quite literally? and so was a sense ofwhat mit should do. and a bunch of councilsand groups met.

there was a thing-- i forget with the name was, butthere was a council that sort of talked about mit'sagenda going ahead and talked about all sorts of stuff. and they barely mentioned thatthere was an internet. there was a phrase that said-- literal phrase-- mit should focus 02139. and there was this grudging ideathat there was something

outside in terms of theopportunities for mit going forward in the future. and then there was anothercommittee which said the opposite, that was run by nicknegroponte and mike dertouzos, that basically said, gosh,mit is the most wonderful place in the world. we should be expansive. and we should just take millionsof dollars and invest this in all sorts oftechnology things.

and these two committees werekind of at loggerheads. what kind of happened is thetechnology committee got saddled with, you guys are justa bunch of technological determinism. in this place, we don't haveto think about it. the other committee said wow,this is really about the spirit of mit. but there was tremendousdissatisfaction because it was just ignoring the waythe world was going.

and so bob brown sort ofwanted to find a way to mediate this stuff, to thinkabout what's the way forward, looking at these things. and he formed the council oneducational technology, which it's kind of hidden agenda wasto do that, find a path. so one of the things we did iswe actually got mckinsey in to do a consulting-- their standard kind of strategicconsulting, saying where we are we going, whatare the opportunities?

and we kind of said mit isdoing a whole bunch of disjointed things. one of the consultant's had areally nice graphic he made with a whole bunch of sailboats that were mit things. and all the sailboats weregoing off in all kinds of different directions. and we did a survey ofthe mit community about what's important.

and what was interesting is notcoming from us on this ed tech council, but as said backto us by the consultants, it said, gee, what's reallyimportant at mit is the integration of researchand education. and now what's that say? that says if you're thinkingabout distance learning in this sense, if somehow that isjust curriculum material and it's not infused with the notionof research, that's kind of not an mit education.

so that one kind of fundamentalthey heard. another one they heardwhich this notion of an integrated faculty. so mit, unlike lots of otherplaces, has this notion of one faculty. we don't have graduate facultyor we don't have teaching faculty and research faculty. we have faculty. and there's the sense if you'reon the faculty, you're

supposed to do allof these things. so there's this notion of ifwe really went and like oh, the harvard extension school,had a whole bunch of people who are not actual harvardfaculty who were teaching this thing, ahh, that's not thesort of thing mit does. so there were a bunch ofprinciples like that. and eventually we were sort ofsaying as mit goes forward, do we think about expandingto new communities? right now we think of ourpotential student body as the

top whatever it is, two percent,three percent of students in the world. should we be thetop 10 percent? so there was this notion ofwho we actually talk to? and we kind of strategicallysaid we actually want to stay with the communities ofpeople that we know. and we want to stay with an mitof kind of style thing. and that morphed into a thingthat said we really want to change the dynamic of how astudent interacts with mit to

something that canbe lifelong. so there was this idea thatright now you graduate mit, and what it means basicallymeans to be an alum is that every year the institute sendsyou requests for money. and we're saying shouldn't therebe a different kind of thing with that where you canparticipate in this community intellectually fora long time? so that was one of these things called lifelong education.

and so out of that strategicthing, there came another thing, saying well,we kind of decided on that as the direction. let's mush out this lifelonglearning thing. let's figure out what it is. we actually did anotherconsulting engagement with booz allen, who came in as veryanalytical, saying is this going to work? and basically after longdrawn-out things and analyses

and talking to possible clientsand competitors and offices at mit about everything,they found it wasn't going to work. so they called in one of theirspreadsheet ninjas, who made this giant thing with everypossible parameter you could imagine, what are the productionvalues, how long is the course, what'sthe client thing. and basically it turned outthat, i forget, if you've got 20,000 doing a course,you could kind of

a break-even, maybe. so this whole committee wasactually pretty-- oh my god, what are we going to do? and finally, i thinkit was dick yue, there's some famous story-- i don't know if youtalked to him. there's this famousstory about he was exercising or something. and it sort of came to him aboutwell, why don't we take

this stuff and give it away. and that sounds likea crazy idea. but then you sort of think wellyou know, if we're not going to make money chargingalumni and other people to do this, maybe we can getfoundations to pay for this. so it wasn't a totallycrazy idea. and then at the end of thesummer what happened was the committee producedthis report. so that was the otherthing that dick did.

mit believes in data. and he did this amazing thing,which is whenever the consultants would do anything,they'd interview somebody, and he'd sort of xerox the sheet. and he put it in thisbig notebook. and he had a notebook whichwas literally this high. and when he'd come in to makea presentation, he'd put the notebook on the desk, sayingthe committee has done this research for its conclusions.

and nobody would dare challengehim on that, despite the fact that nothing in thenotebook was relevant to what he was saying. it was just a great,great ploy. but it's again, engineer'sculture. we like data. but the committee's report wasthis incredibly precise reasoned out,spreadsheet-backed, financial model thing about how we coulddo some for pay lifelong

learning things withcareful analysis. and then at the end, therewas about two pages. it said, and by the way, we havethis other idea that we should just give it away. and we'll call itopencourseware. with no analysis or anything. and then to its tremendouscredit, chuck bastian, bob and tom magnanti got inspired bythis and said yeah, this one seems right.

and that's what actually startedthe path towards and then there were alot of talks with-- chuck went and got money fromthe hewlett and mellon foundations. and we did a bunch of things,talked with the faculty over the year. but that's kind ofhow it started. and again, it started in thisworld of mit is going to be the exemplar.

so we weren't talking reallyabout distance education. we weren't even thinkingabout the students who were going to do it. we were thinking abouthere mit is exhibiting itself as a model. it was right for 2000. and it sort of grabbedeverybody's imagination. and then it happened as yousaid, at exactly the time that lots of these other universitieswere saying wow,

we're going to make tremendousmoney for this. there were lots of start-ups. i don't know if peoplenoticed. i once went back and looked. and there were lots and lots ofplaces that when we did the original mckinsey analysis,were saying, oh god, these people are starting. their company is starting. their universityis doing stuff.

none of them are inbusiness anymore. and it was just greatthat we can be so counter-intuitive as mit. a very mit thing. interviewer: can you talk a bitabout the faculty reaction when ocw was first floatedas a concept. supportive, not supportive,what was the response? abelson: it was surprisinglysupportive. and in fact larry bacow, who waschancellor then, basically

said, look, you cannot go aheadwith this unless you really go, really talkto the faculty. so there was a group of aboutfour or five of us who made presentations to every singlemit department. and we listened toa lot of stuff. i'd say the predominant negativereaction was oh my god, you want to take my classnotes and put them out on the internet for everybodyto look at. they're not good enough.

and we got really good it sayinghey, you're willing to give this to mit students whoare paying $40,000 dollars a year to listen to you. and you don't think they'regood enough to put out for free to other peopleto look at? so we learned to makeinteresting answers to those things. but it was to me surprisinglypositive. what everyone was expecting was,oh my god, you're giving

away my intellectual property. i mean there might have beenfive people who said that. but it was almost unheard of. it was much more than the otherreaction i said: well god, you're showing my stuffin other than its pristine state after i've workedon the publication manuscript for a long time. but it was just very,very popular. and it certainly helped thatthe administration was so

incredibly visibly positiveabout this. but again opencoursewaregot positioned. we made some adjustments, sometweaks in the way we told the story and what we did. i frankly don't rememberwhat they were. but it was really very importantto us that this came out as an expression ofthe mit community. so it wasn't a administrationdriven, something, something, something.

it really was an expression ofwhat the faculty wanted to do. interviewer: so you talked aboutopencourseware as one example of mit or what mitdoes being an exemplar. ten plus years out, what hasocw's impact been on the broader world? abelson: oh, well ocw createdwhat's called open educational resources. so there is now an enormous iwant to say movement that's called oer, open educationalresources.

that word started at a unconference which was talking about opencourseware andsome more things. that's where the wordgot coined. and it got elevated to-- i forget what the phrase is--how do you think about education and the internet toimprove the state of humanity? and really a very long thing. but now there's an enormous,enormous whole open educational resourcesmovement.

you've got to remember whenopencourseware started, there was not the idea thatuniversities at scale would put educational material onthe internet for free. and now that's, wellsure, ho hum. so it caused just a majorchange in the way people did it. and it was a combination ofthat the time was kind of right for it, the technologywas right for it. but also mit put itsinstitutional

imprimatur on that idea. so it's been enormous. and not all of it identifiesitself as universities. and not all of it identifiesitself as certainly mit or something. but just the idea that you cannow go to the internet and find a lot of educationalmaterial, that's what opencourseware started. interviewer: what doyou see as the

future for that movement? abelson: so this is somethingthat we think about a lot with opencourseware and a lot fromplaces like creative commons. i kind of want tosay it's done. again, i have to say therereally was a question, right, in 2000, about whether therecould be a lot of free educational materialon the internet. it really was a question. now it's not.

and in a sense that'skind of happened. so the real future nowis how do you make that stuff more usable? there's no sense of allthe quality of it. there's no sense that i canreally get certification that comes from it. there's no real sense ofhow it fits together. there's no sense of gosh,here are three different presentations of diffraction.

how do they compare? which one should i use? so at the moment what'shappening it's a tremendous amount of raw materialthat has not very effectively been mined. and what's happening now isthere are lots and lots of both nonprofit companies and forprofit start-ups that are trying to mine that insome effective way. nobody's cracked it yet.

but that's whereit needs to go. and it's kind of hard problembecause it's one thing to publish a lot of materialon the network. but when you start talking aboutreal education, you're talking about interaction withpeople and empowering groups to do stuff, thinking about didpeople actually learn the stuff, do you certify it,how do you certify it, how do you use it? so it's a lot harder work.

and that's where themovement has to go. interviewer: so you mentionedthat a lot of that's unresolved. but are there directions orideas that you have in terms of making this material moreusable or things that need to be addressed? abelson: oh sure. i mean me and a thousandother people. they're all sorts ofelements to it.

can i find something? if i want to go find anexplanation of magnetism that's really good for eighthgraders, can i find that? there are lots of places thatare working on that. google is working on that. creative commons isworking on that. lots and lots of placesdoing that. the other one is how do youbridge the gap between even for profit textbooks andthis open stuff?

or to say it another way, ifthere's a lot of open stuff, there are a lot of people whoare starting companies that say well, what's the missingpiece in that, that i can add that'll be a sustainablebusiness. and sometimes it's certificationand sometimes it's editing of the things andsometimes it's organization and sometimes it's addingsome special videos or something to it. people just exploring thatall over the map.

that really is the bigthing in educational technology right now. there are textbook companiesthat say how do i make a mixture of the stuff i hirepeople to write things, but also back on to all ofthis open stuff? so there's not goingto be one answer. and i think there's going to bean explosion over the next oh five years, of peopletrying lots and lots of and who knows?

it might converge on somethingafter a while. interviewer: so you've beeninvolved in obviously other initiatives as well that arevery, very significant, icampus being one, dspace. talk a bit about those. and i'm kind of lumping themtogether, just part in the interest of time. but i'm going to let you sort oftell me what you think are the most significant?

and maybe just sort of wrappingit in the larger question of how technology haschanged and continues to change the classroomexperience? abelson: so sort of big area. and we can take it in pieces,if that's easy. abelson: so dspaceis kind of not really about the classroom. but it's one i like to talkabout because that one's actually strategic.

that was actually-- i almost want to say crafted byann wolpert, who's the head of libraries, and me, having todo with the issue of, will the public be able to get accessto university research? so opencourseware is about thisvision of the educational materials of the world'sgreatest institutions are available to all of humanity. dspace is about the vision ofare the research let's say products of the top researchenterprises in the world

available to all of humanity? it's that vision. and then you sort of want to saywell okay, well it's easy. in fact, we should just postthis on the internet. and then you say why not? and then you find that there'sno sense of gosh, what's it's mean to post it onthe internet? is there a trusted place thathas a pedigree in putting my research materials out in a waythat they're going to be

proper stewardship of those? and so we said one placeto do that is the research libraries. so the libraries of the topresearch institutions could fulfill that role. and dspace was reallyabout that. this was very early. and it was kind of saying welllook, we see-- when was this, 1999 or something?

we kind of see this thingbrewing with the ability to put stuff on the internet. and we see this is going to becoming more and more of a controversial flashpoint thing. we were absolutelyright about that. and we said what's missing fromthat is the notion that a university research librarycould be a place that a research scientist wouldtrust as a place to look around the internet.

so dspace was aboutcreating that. and that's happenedto a large extent. it needs to happen a lot more. we're now in the interestingstage of that where the publishers and journalsare fighting back. so you know the famousgandhi thing. first, they ignore you. then they laugh at you. then they fight you.

then they lose. so we're sort of startingto get into then they fight us stage. but i have a lot of optimismthat'll work out. so dspace is not particularlyabout the classroom. but the classroom stuff is avery, very complicated mix because part of what you wantto think about is making it expansive, making this world ofsharing, making this world where stuff is very possible.

but at the same time, you wantto think about what's really special about mit. what's the stuff that i wantto do in my class that i really don't want to share,because i want to say to these students, my god, you'renot just in any place. you're at mit. and this thing that's happeningin this classroom now is really aboutour small group. and it's personal things.

and i don't know wherethat ends out. but i think both ofthose things are happening at the same time. and so that ends up being awhole bunch of different kinds of initiatives that look atthat in different ways. so one of them is the thing wefunded under the microsoft icampus alliance, which is thenotion of remote laboratories, the ilabs thing that initiallystarted with jesus del alamo in electronic engineering thatsaid, gosh, i'm doing these

labs for mit students whoare taking this thing. and just think about whatit takes to a lab. you come in, and you have tospend 30 minutes setting it up, and the equipment's broken,and you have to go through the safety class to makesure you don't do things. when the reality is, you'rejust doing a three minute experiment. wouldn't it be nice if you coulddo that from your dorm room over the internet?

and that was sort of wherejesus's his vision of that started in the circuitscourse. and then we sort of said yeah,once you do that, once you can be across the campus,hey it's on the web. it could be across the world. so there's this view of can youtake those real laboratory experiences and in a sense makethem accessed remotely? so that's a little bit of tryingto bridge this, hey, it's special, but it's alsoaccessible kind of thing.

the stuff that i'd love to beplaying with now is how you do like remote tutoring? how do i make it so if i'm insome kind of laboratory or some kind of classroom sessionwhere i'm getting individual instruction, you could alsoimagine doing that from across the world? those are some of the thingsthat i'm trying to think about with the ed tech councilright now. and then at the same timethere's the evolution of

opencourseware like things. we're sort of moving to a newstage in that where the idea that there's effectively a bookon the internet, well that's good. but people want more. and we have to think aboutwhat the next stuff is. interviewer: so given that somuch of this revolves around remote learning-- ilab or opencourseware--

what is the actual role of thephysical location of the classroom and the class thatgets together with a faculty member or an instructorgoing forward? what an incrediblygood question. because again on the one hand,there are some places in education, not the large lectureor anything, where you really, really, really wantthe sense of intimacy. i mean as much as you could everwant, you really have to be, i'm here for you.

i'm here for you students andwe're doing this thing. and we're engaged in thisdiscussion right now. and i don't want this stuffgoing outside the classroom because what's happening with usright now is very special. i'm telling you thingsthat we just don't-- this is about us right now. and that's really, reallyimportant and will be important forever. the hard part is you have to askyourself how much of that

sense of intimacy is technologynow going to be able to supply? and we're going tobe figuring this. three years ago, it was a bigdeal to get on a video conference with somebody. and i do that with peopleacross the world from my office and it's no more thansending a note saying hey, are you on skype now? let's connect.

and we have a conversation. you have to ask yourself well,what are you losing by not being physicallypresent there? and there's just a lotof research on that. they're all these shared conference spaces or something. i don't think people have doneenough of thinking about that with respect to educationand seminars and things. but sure, people aregoing to try it.

and we're going to find out. a lot of people feel likethey're a little scared to go there because the implicationsof that is that maybe the physical thing doesn'tmatter for that. and then you say well, thatwasn't the important part about the physical location. the important part about thephysical location is that you're hanging aroundin the same place. there are all theseserendipitous things that

happen, what do they call it,the water cooler effect. and that's the really importantthing about having a physical location. and then you sort of say, wellyou know there are these people who are workingon that too. and you have some stuff andyou can counter people. there have been all theseexperiments with virtual worlds, which seem to had a lotmore pizazz three years ago than they do now.

but you're going to findtechnology being able to do pieces of that. and i don't know, we're going tofind out which versions of that were important. we can all make up sciencefiction stories about how physical presencedoesn't matter. but the point is for at leastright now, physical presence matters a whole hell of a lot. and we'll sort of piece togetherthe things that make

it work and are necessary andwhich can be supplanted. interviewer: so i want to returntoo to something that you said not too long ago aboutsort of that point when you started thinking about howmit as an institution deals with these kinds of questions. and i guess my question is,given this very thorny question that we were justdiscussing, how should mit deal with that? how should mit going forward,thinking about the next five,

10, whatever years, deal withthis very, very important question of the classroomversus remote learning? and is it technology driven, isit policy driven, is it a combination? abelson: i kind of want to sayit's ethically driven. i really do feel that mit hasan almost ethical obligation to say look, we are aprecious resource. we understand about learningand technology and things. i hate to sound maudlin.

we have an obligation tohumanity to make that better. and what's the way in which mitcan be an exemplar of that and a model of that? and it means that when you thinkabout what we should do in educational technology atmit, you really are thinking that you're a model forthe rest of the world. and how would you likethat to happen? how would you liketo play out? when we do something great in aclassroom, we are obligated

to say how can other peoplefollow that or how could other people think about whetherit's a good thing to do. it's not just about mit. it's a world resource that thoseof us who are teaching are just privilegedto be part of. and that privilege is not onlyabout mit undergraduate body. it's about how the worldis going to look at it. so that doesn't tell you whatto do but it's the sense of obligation that you feel indoing that, that it's not just

looking inward. there are places that arenot like that at all. i mean harvard by and largeis not like that. but mit is the sense of god,we're doing it for the world. and that's how i think about theinstitutional thing when we do educational technology. interviewer: this isn't aboutthe classroom specifically, but it very much relatesto what you just said. i wanted to ask you aboutthe open access policy.

abelson: oh, right. that threads through lots andlots and lots of this. i talked before about dspace. so that's open access. i'm also one of the foundingdirectors for the free software foundation,which is-- again growth, we talked beforeabout the ai lab culture. it grows right out of that. that it's about acommunity thing.

and the precious thing is thatyou allow people to build on each other's work. so a lot of times when peopletalk about open access, they say gee, i ought to be ableto read some stuff on the internet or be able to do stuffor it's locked away and i shouldn't have topay to get it. that's not the spirit, that'snot the soul of it. the soul of it is that we canbuild a shared thing together. i always use the metaphor ofthere was this thing that

happened in the middle ageswhere the whole town together got and built the cathedral. and i sort of think about theinformation environment as the opportunity to make thatkind of cathedral. that humanity as a whole getssmarter because we can rebuild what each others are doing. and we can build on it. so that's for me, whatopen access is about. that's what opencoursewareis about.

so it's critical if you lookat the license behind opencourseware or freesoftware, any of it. one of it is that people getto use it how they want. but the other is that people getto modify and we republish it and make it betterand improve. so for me that's justcentral to what people call open access. open access is in some sense abad word because it doesn't have this sense of buildingon each other's work.

i'm sort of playing with thisnew slogan that i want to call the remixed university. that's the stage after justthe open university. it's not so interesting. i can go look at the classesthat mit teaches. it's can that be a thing fromwhich i can build even better stuff than mit is doing. and that to me is just a centralmeme in how i hope the internet continues to go.

the internet starteda lot of that. much of it's being threatened. but i think part of it isdemonstrating to people the value of that. interviewer: so in talking orthinking a bit about your work in protecting the intellectualcommons, you mentioned the free software foundation, whichis definitely something that i wanted to talkto you about. tell me about creative commons,another i think

important part of this. abelson: right. there was this magical coupleyears where we started dspace, we started opencourseware, weshowed creative commons, right around 2000. so i had the tremendous fortuneof actually working with larry lessig. we tried a joint course betweenharvard and mit when he was formulating these ideasabout open culture and things.

and creative commons kind ofstarted in a couple of discussions, the sense of shouldthere be something about sharing and commonsthat could happen in terms of law or policy? larry had just recentlyunsuccessfully argued eldred v. ashcroft before thesupreme court. so that was when congressextended copyright by another 20 years. and that came up tothe supreme court.

and larry argued at the supremecourt and he lost. the supreme court basically saidwell, you may have shown that this is a bad idea toextend copyright. but by the way, it's congressthat makes the copyright law, not us. and larry was looking for someconstructive reaction to that. i was thinking about some kindof way of rewarding people effectively for putting thingsinto the public domain. what could you do bypolicy to stimulate

that kind of sharing? we talked about that. larry found some funding. and we got this idea ofcreative commons. there were small groupof about, i want to say about 10 of us. and sort of said gee, what wewant to do is in the phrase, brand the public domain. we wanted people to be awarethat the shared stuff that you

can use and reuse was notsort of the detritus. the law in the us talks aboutabandoning something to the public domain. it was not sort of thisinvisible stuff. one of the things you can doon the internet is you can actually give that an identityand make people aware of it. that was the soul ofcreative commons. and then it kind of linked intosome stuff that i'd been doing with the web consortiumthat said oh by the way, one

of the things you might want todo if you're going to make licenses crafted to that, youwant to make those licenses machine readableso machines can identify that on the internet. so that's the start ofcreative commons. and that program is sortof still going ahead. it's got a long, long,long way to go. i remember we were sittingaround and saying well, what would be success?

how many things do you thinkshould have these licenses? so i'm always the poornon-visionary. and i said, gosh if we got acouple of million of things on the net with the creativecommons, that would be really good. and larry said well, i actuallythink all of it should be creative commons. and then we seem tohave compromised. now there's about 200 millioncreative commons

documents on the net. so it will also hit ameme and expand it. and by the way, had a lot todo with opencourseware. so i was very active in thestart up of both of those. and from the point of view ofcreative commons, mit was the first sort of big, importantplace to adopt creative commons licenses. and from the point of view ofopencourseware, we wanted there to be a lot of freelylicensed stuff on the web.

so in particular when i put upmy lectures on opencourseware and i want to put someillustrations into my lecture, there's a lot of creativecommons licensed stuff that i could just use. so that program still hasn'tunfolded a lot. but it was very consciously-- at least i thought about it. i was working on thosetwo things together. interviewer: you mentionedthat open access or the

intellectual commonsis under threat. can you talk a bit about that,the current environment now as opposed to when you werepioneering all of this? abelson: well like i said, we'vegone from the stage of they ignore us to the stagewhere they laugh at us to the stage where they are actuallyfighting us. the rhetoric in congressnow is we're stealing all of this stuff. everybody is stealing stuff onthe internet, that why don't

you pay for it? gosh, the us economy depend somuch on intellectual property and exporting that, wehave to protect the stuff on the network. and the whole rhetoric iscompletely dominated by that. i mean part of the problem isthat creative common sounds a lot like communist. so everyonesays gosh, you guys are a bunch of communists. you want to steal our stuff.

oh my god, there was an articlewhen creative commons was first starting up, in wasit billboard, which talked about gosh, there is this youngcomposer who puts his music up on a creativecommons thing. and this turned outto be a great hit. and now he can't get anymonetary value to it because he gave it away. and he's dying of aids and can'tpay for the medication that he needs.

and you creative commons peopleare the ones who is responsible for thisguy dying of aids. and there's this whole rhetoricthat's around it, because people are starting tosee that it's getting serious. and you have a lot of businessmodels that are simply based on the fact that youcould control the distribution channels. so a lot of people think thatthose of us in creative commons are against copyrightand against commercialism.

and that's just not true. i mean creative commonsis built in copyright. and the thing that i think isbad is not that people are making money, it's that they'reexerting over-control. so if there is a way to, withoutexerting that kind of control, realize money fromthis stuff, well great. i mean i love it if people saygee, we've got a business and it's working on creativecommons stuff. but maybe it's a servicebusiness.

or maybe it's an advising kindof business or maybe it's some other spin where you use thefree material to bolster the fact that you're providingother stuff of value. and i think that's wherethis stuff needs to go. but the particular thing thatworks is very sensitive to the state of technologyof the web. and that's evolving very, veryfast. and it's just sort of exploring more, exploringmore business models. but when i said people arefighting it, by and large

you're seeing people in theold business models who of course are established, who ofcourse have stories that congress understands. so it's always hard when you'retrying to make policy and you have a visionof what could be. a vision of what could be isnever powerful compared to a vision of what is. and it just takes a long time. interviewer: so in movingtowards wrapping up just a

bit, in these two related butsomewhat differing areas of open networks, open access,and educational technology with a focus on this wholequestion of the remoteness or the locality of education,mit has been obviously historically a leader in bothof those areas, if you think about opencourseware asone example of many. what should mit be doing lookingahead to continue to lead and be ethicalas you said? i mean are there things thatmit is not doing that it

should be doing or thatit is doing that it should continue to do? abelson: so one of the thingsthat mit is not doing, and i'm not sure why not, is we arecurrently making a lot of partnerships with institutionsaround the world, which i think is fantastic. but too often there is noeducational piece in those partnerships. so we talk about mit'sassociation with some research

institute and partly becauseof what these other places want from mit and whether theyview mit, they sort of say this is a great researchpartnership. and one of the things mit needsto be insisting on is what's the place of studentsand undergraduates in that kind of partnership? mit needs to say as part ofleading the world, we deeply believe that what makes aninstitution like mit work is the integration of researchand education.

mit is not saying thatstrongly enough. and i think that's another placewhere mit needs to lead. it's saying how do you becomea great institution? it's not only a good idea to beinvolved in education, but it's integral to what makesthe place successful. so there's a thing mit is notdoing right now, that i really wish it were going more. the other thing that i'mpersonally working on with the educational technology counciland with the provosts is this

notion of opening the walls ofthe university in the sense that it's not merely let's saythe opencourseware vision or the dspace vision that says mitputs stuff out that allows the world to participate. it's that there's a wayof taking stuff in. what role in terms ofeducational resources do our alumni play? if you take the combined mitalumni, which are what now, 80,000, 90,000, you have aconsiderable fraction of the

technological powerof the world. how does mit use that as aresearch for improving our education and again creating amodel of how top technology people can contribute toinstitutions in the world. mit is not doing that enough. that's a little bit of whatwe're trying to work on now. in a world where, oh someuniversity i want to mention and say we could teach calculusto 50,000 people in some foreign country, how do weuse technology to allow our

undergraduates to havetremendously good international experiences,while taking some mit calculus? are there ways we can translatelittle pieces of mit so that mit students can havesome of these experiences without feeling that theyhave to blow off courses for a semester? the mechanical engineeringdepartment talks about wouldn't it be great ifstudents in mechanical

engineering could take two weeksoff and go build cars and race them on theisle of white. how do we make that possible? so that's a direction wherei think mit needs to go. i said there's this buzz word,the remixed university. how do we make that possibleand how does mit lead in showing how you can makethat possible? interviewer: i mean mitobviously is a place with tremendous technicaltechnological expertise.

but our conversation has rangedover all sorts of topics that go beyond simpletechnology, policy issues, just how we live ourlives in the world. and i'm wondering if you couldtalk a bit about what special or particular roletechnologists, engineers should or could play inthose broader ethical, philosophical, policykinds of questions? abelson: well, part is the easything about just knowing the consequences or the likelyconsequences of certain kinds

of investments or policies. and i don't think anybody willargue that engineers and scientists should speakup about that. but i think beyond that there'sthis sense of actually making things, which i dothink is very special to it's really find to talk aboutthings and to discuss, and discuss, and discuss, but at theend of the day you have to have some effect and somekind of impact. and engineers are greatin doing things.

it's not always right. but there's this notion of youkind of have to put it on the line and make something. and that's part of what itmeans to, i want to say participate in the discussionof how the world should be. you come in and you actuallythink about how to make it. and you try it. and you never get it rightthe first time. and then you make it better.

and there needs to be thatsense of instrumentality. and that's what i think a placelike mit and a place like engineering cultures canadd to these discussions. and there needs to be a wholelot more of that. interviewer: is there anythingthat you haven't had a chance to talk about that we shouldhave touched on as we're wrapping up. abelson: well no, other thani'm constantly humbled and amazed and charged by justthe privilege of being in

a place like mit. i mean everybody talks aboutwhat a unique place it is. but there's just this personalsense of how in hell did i ever end up here, interactingwith this group of people? so i drive in from newtonevery morning. and there's this place whereyou drive up commonwealth avenue and then yousort of turn and go over the bu bridge. and the bu bridge sort of lookslike this gateway thing.

and i say, i can't believe it. it's almost every day, afterso many years, i say oh my god, i'm coming to mit. how did i manage to do this? how did i get so lucky as to bein a place like this, just surrounded by all of thesebrilliant people and all of these incredible students? interviewer: okay. well, thanks so much hal.

i really appreciate you takingthe time to talk to us. interviewer: it was wonderful. thank you.

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