"Sandbox" or "Theme Park"?

I enjoyed Gardner Campbell's interview with Jon Udell, so I'm following his blog now.

Here's my reply to Theme Parks and Sandboxes.

I think that one man's sandbox is another man's theme park, and that we should alternate. A professor's sandbox may be a grad student's theme park, until they know just enough to build their own. The same would be true for a grad student to an undergrad. A team of undergrad student's sandbox could be a professor's theme park.

The problem is in the content development platform. As you noted in your interview, paper-based learning encourages the theme park environment because it's so hard to change (unless you use it for origami on a very large table :) ). But, that kind of learning or park ride is also traditional, popular, and repeatable. Sandboxes seem to be traditionally found in (shudder) apprenticeships and trade schools where one manipulates the physical world around oneself and where one must learn the personality of the physical material, and its unpredictability, more so than someone else's mental skill.

Current content development platforms' strengths and weaknesses can be evaluated by looking at the core building blocks which the participant/reader/creator can manipulate. Second Life is a sandbox up to the point of the edge of the real estate. There are some seriously limiting factors in that real estate bias of SL. Just as artists know, to convey detail, one needs a very large canvas to start with. Also text and text documents are second class citizens in a SL world, as exhibited by the limited searching ability. This is difficult when we exist in a world of text documents which represent our invisible mental world (like the invisible mental world of "ownership" where everything you own isn't physically labeled but "documented"). Blogs are good for text and dates, but not so much for, say, creating 2D illustrations. Other platforms lack "communication" as a fundamental building block. Operating systems' fundamental building blocks are files.

So, it seems to me that we desire a development platform where 3D, 2D illustration/animation, 1D text, hypertext, movies, and the labels for ideas (and how these all co-exist and intermix) are all first class citizens for building block manipulation. Croquet, built on Squeak, Morphic, Smalltalk, and the constructionist learning philosophy, while still in its embryonic stage, seems the best candidate to me.
YouTube video
Med res video