I’m always in the mood for rich analogies.

This one comes from the November 28, 2007 New York Times’ Arts section. I’ve been tempted to do a granular analysis of the entire section, as I was startled by how casually and completely it featured various computer-related stories, ads, etc. Alas, any such analyses will have to wait until the end of term when all the grades are in. For now, however, I would like to offer these paragraphs from a story about EVE Online. I won’t explain EVE here–you can read the article for that–but I will say that the dichotomy CEO Hilmar Petursson proposes is especially interesting to me from the point of view of education, or curriculum, or online learning, or even a course syllabus:

“There are basically two schools of thought for operating an online community,” Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

“There is the theme-park approach and the sandbox approach,” he continued. “Most games are like Disneyland, for instance, which is a carefully constructed experience where you stand in line to be entertained. We focus on the sandbox approach where people can decide what they want to do in that particular sandbox, and we very much emphasize and support that kind of emergent behavior.”

Substitute “educated” for “entertained,” and “learning community” for “online community.” Several things come to mind, ill-formed and in no particular order:

1. Most colleges and universities are more theme-parks than sandboxes. That trend is accelerating, given that theme-parks seem to be able to scale better. I say “seem to,” because EVE’s business model clearly indicates their belief that sandboxes supporting emergent behavior can scale as well. Yet we live in a time of dramatically declining public support for higher education in which one very popular solution to the problem is to make learning experiences as uniform as possible (guaranteeing more uniform outcomes), increase access by scaling class sizes (especially at the introductory level) to 300-500 students per professor, and cut costs by outsourcing grading and class management to various contractors. Bigger turnstiles and better oil for the gears. More people get in, more people do just well enough to get out. And we all drive home satisfied at the end of the day. That’s a theme-park, not a sandbox.

2. Assessing emergent behaviors in sandboxes requires much more imagination and rigor than assessing the results of a theme-park experience of education. The current (and worthwhile, in my view) resurgence of interest in thorough assessment unfortunately drives more theme-park construction than sandbox construction. Our answers are only as good as the questions we ask. Can we not devise imaginative, rigorous assessment of emergent behaviors, despite the fact that by definition we will have to think of “outcomes” and “value-adds” differently?

3. As I understand it, Ivan Illich’s radical view of “deschooling” does not devalue curriculum per se, but it does insist that only a sandbox approach results in authentic learning. That’s a bold claim and I’m not sure I agree entirely. Sometimes learners have to be brought through an experience, a course of study, a set of assignments, that will support more valuable kinds of emergent potential on the other side. In other words, sometimes rote memorization (think of the alphabet or the multiplcation table), or what my German teacher in college called “sitzen und schwitzen” (sit and sweat), are necessary admission requirements to the more interesting sandboxes. I also believe in the value of vertically-building curricula that recognize and support the unavoidable developmental aspects of education.

And yet I wonder if the passivity and lack of deep curiosity I see very often in my students would be different if Ilich’s vision were fully realized, or if they saw the ends to which the means directed them. But this is to say that I am not sure my students have a deep understanding of what school is good for. I am not sure schools understand that very deeply either.

4. I wonder if the dichotomy of theme-park vs. sandbox has certain false aspects. For example, one could put sandboxes within theme parks, and theme parks within sandboxes. Vary the experience, find a rhythm. Not every movie is a game, not every game is a movie, not every learning experience requires emergence within the experience to be satisfying. That said, without emergence, I don’t see how the core academic mission, and the strategies that follow, have much integrity beyond drill-and-kill.

Probably the most emergent, sandbox-type learning experience I ever had was writing my dissertation. In the humanities, especially in English, the Ph.D. dissertation can be (and often is) nothing but a bootstrapping operation. I remember feeling almost entirely alone, becalmed on vast sea with no landmarks or compass to steer by. On one level, that was clearly an illusion. I had a library full of landmarks, notebooks full of compasses. I had peers working on their dissertations. I had a director, a second reader, a third reader at another school. All in all, I had a deep and wide support network. No, I think I felt so alone and lost because I knew that this project, unlike any project I’d tackled before, was entirely up to me. It existed outside any container. I was the experience. I was the project. And that’s why it was truly transformative.

I understand that not everyone has that experience as a result of their dissertation, but in some respects I think that’s what the dissertation is for. I wish the loneliness and terror weren’t so bad, and perhaps they’re not that bad for everyone, but there’s also some useful authenticity there. The profound uneasiness I felt was not just neurosis. It was also a signal that something real was occurring.

I’ve come a long way from EVE Online, I see. But I sense certain connections that merit a mull or two. And the word “sandbox” has a special resonance for me.