Lemelson-MIT Program

Steve Jobs ranked behind Thomas Edison in a question to young Americans about who is the greatest innovator of all time.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs ranks behind only Thomas Edison as the world's greatest innovator of all time in a survey released today on young Americans' attitudes about invention and innovation.

Jobs' innovations include the iPhone and iPad, the popular gadgets that are helping to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and sent Apple's stock to a record high Wednesday. 

His second-place finish in the survey of Americans aged 16 to 25 surprised Leigh Estabrooks, the invention education officer with the Lemelson-MIT Program, which conducted the survey.

"Here we have this innovation role model who has changed the way we live and yet young people still go back to Thomas Edison," she told me. "While he did great and wonderful things, most of his work was in the 1880s."

The result highlights the fact that invention and innovation are primarily taught in history class, not the math and science courses that are the foundation for careers in invention and innovation.

"Thomas Edison comes up because all students take history," she said. That's where we learned, for example, about his life-changing electric power distribution system and his money-making stock ticker.

Next-generation innovators
The Lemelson-MIT Program aims to foster an innovative spirit in America's youth. The annual Invention Index helps the program gauge the level of interest among young people in becoming innovators.

This year's results show that young Americans are aware of the role invention and innovation play in their lives and its importance as an economic driver, but 60 percent feel inhibited in pursing inventive careers themselves.

Many — 34 percent — said they simply don’t know enough about these fields. "That's daunting for a teenager to think about going into a field that they don’t know much about," Estabrooks noted.

Other students consider these fields too challenging to pursue and/or feel they were unprepared for such a career track in school.

According to Estabrooks, increasing awareness of career options in these fields is a key step. That means more mentors coming into classrooms to talk, especially to elementary and middle school students.

"The sooner we can share with kids the things they can do with science, technology, engineering and math, the better off we'll be," she said. 

"It is awfully hard to catch up with the math once you're in high school and almost impossible once you're in college."

"And it is hard," she added. "Therefore mentors can help by encouraging students to stick with it."

Hands-on experiences
More than just listening to an engineer or computer programmer talk, hands-on experiences inside and outside the classroom are paramount to fostering a new generation of innovators.

The survey shows American youth hunger for these opportunities, such as invention projects at school and creative field trips. Simply "a place to develop an invention" would be a good start for 52 percent of the respondents.

The opportunity to invent is working its way into classrooms across the country thanks to initiatives such as a framework for next-generation science standards released in July 2011 by the National Academy of Sciences.

The framework outlines a way for science teachers to incorporate engineering into their lessons, Kristina Peterson, head of the middle school science department at the Lakeside School in Seattle, Wash., explained to me.

(Disclosures: I'm a Lakeside alumnus as is Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates, another great innovator who, it turns out, wasn't included in the survey. Msnbc.com is a joint venture between Microsoft and Comcast/NBC Universal.)

The school is in its second year of a revamped science curriculum that includes an engineering thread in all the science courses, grades 5-8, partially based on materials from the Boston Museum of Science.

"A key thing is engaging students in what's called engineering design process," Peterson said. "It has them not only inventing things, but also the big picture of the process of inventing."

Students learn to brainstorm ideas, research them, and communicate their goals, for example. They also learn to evaluate what they create so they can improve it with a redesign.

Other schools around the country are involved with programs such as Lemelson-MIT's own InvenTeams as well as First Robotics and First Lego League that provide the hands-on experience outside of the class.

And outside of the classroom learning has its advantages, according to Estabrooks.

For one, there's a finite amount time within the school day to learn. Students can tinker more outside of class time. As well, grades don't apply after school.

"One thing about inventors is that we encourage them to fail quickly and fail often," she said. "And in our academics, we certainly don't encourage our youth to fail."

Steve Jobs, who died last October, was certainly prone to fail. Products from the Apple III computer (1981) to Apple TV (2007) are considered among his misses. 

He was even fired from Apple in 1985, a humbling experience that led to his most fruitful innovations, he said during a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005:

"The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." 

More on innovation education:

• How inventive is the next generation?
• Science fair projects with buzz
• 'Humanized mouse' among student science prizes
• Grant turns lab rats into scientific entrepreneurs

After an Internet activist was indicted on Tuesday for bulk-downloading academic papers, an apparent ally has made 18,592 other papers from the same archive available for anyone to download. 

Open access rebel Aaron Swartz allegedly used guest networks at MIT for a mass download of 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, an academic database.

Seemingly in solidarity with Swartz, someone called Gregory Maxwell has uploaded to 33 GB of journal articles, also obtained from JSTOR, to peer-to-peer file-sharing hub Pirate Bay, GigaOm is reporting. 

Maxwell obtained the articles many years ago, "through rather boring and lawful means," he writes in his Pirate Bay statement. It seems Maxwell's sharing is potentially boring and lawful too: the articles were published before 1923 and are no longer bound by copyright. Maxwell writes: 

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each — for one month's viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

(This may or may not be the case for Swartz's trove — nobody knows what was in it, or if it was still bound by copyright law.)

Maxwell and Swartz are among many who are discontent with the current mode of online science publishing. In most instances, neither authors nor peer reviewers are paid for their work, which is filed away by the journal or databases like JSTOR, resulting in what Maxwell calls "some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy." 

Back when journals were printed on paper, higher fees made some sense. But in the digital age, the argument goes, such information should be cheap, or even free. 

Maxwell first considered posting his stash of documents on a public site like Wikipedia, but such a move would have ticked off publishers. Anonymously posting them didn't seem the way to go either — Maxwell feared the legal system would incorrectly pin that action onto Swartz as well. "This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to," Maxwell writes.

And so, for the sake of science and mankind, Maxwell made his trove of academic papers public. 

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it.

Maxwell told Ars Technica that he is a "hobbyist scientist" and regularly uses scientific papers in his line of work. 

JSTOR's response to the Swartz indictment has been muted, and the digital library has distanced itself from the issue. JSTOR published a press release clarifying that it was "the government's decision whether to prosecute [Swartz], not JSTOR's." When JSTOR became aware of Swartz's mass download, they contacted him and secured the documents. They didn't press charges once they had "received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred or distributed."  

The charges leveled against the open access crusader are associated with his having hacked into the MIT network, and subsequently shutting down JSTOR access to people on the MIT campus. 

More about the open-access dispute: 

• Reddit-connected activist indicted in MIT theft

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about tech and science at msnbc.com. Find her on Twitter and Google+, and join our conversation on Facebook.