Perspectives on Gamification, part 1

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

The Old New Culture of Learning

I’m coming at this in a bit of a roundabout way but bear with me. Back in 2011 there was a somewhat famous book (within education and technology circles, at least) called The New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. The overall point of the book was that in the 21st century, kids needed new ways of learning that better matched the changes in the culture around them. The authors, Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown were steeped in the zeitgeist of 2010s California tech culture. Unlike today, there was a lot of optimism around technology and a broad belief that the ways in which technology was changing society were generally beneficial. So, when a professor of communications and an organizational studies researcher turned assistant-to-the-provost of USC decided to write a book about learning, the market was ready. Thomas explained in a later TEDx talk that the goal of the book was to “address what we saw as some fundamental problems with what was happening in education today.”

Thomas and Brown felt that the kind of learning that humans do naturally and “relatively easily” was often overlooked by schools. In the past this was acceptable because the world of work and society expected specific skills and capabilities. It was okay have a “mechanistic” education that overrode our more naturalistic tendency toward “fundamentally easy” learning. But, here in the 21st century of 2011, the world was changing rapidly. More and more, learning was not taking place in a classroom but “happening all around us, everywhere, and it is powerful.”

In response, schools need to be creating what Thomas and Brown call “bounded and structured environments” where learners have the opportunity to exercise “agency to build and experiment with things within those boundaries.” America’s education system should embrace change and reorient schools around this new culture and capacity for learning. “We can no longer count,” they write in chapter 3, “on being trained to handle each new change in our tools, the media, or the ways we communicate on a case-by-case basis.” Instead, we should think of learning as something that unfolds through processes of play and imagination.

Now, setting aside the contradiction wherein they say their ideas around play learning are new by citing psychological research that Piaget had started nearly 90 years earlier, this is an attractive sell. In subsequent chapters they use various examples to help explain what the culture of learning looks like in that digital, networked infrastructure. They use blogging, specifically Andrew Sullivan, as an example of learning becoming a collective endeavor and that schools should treat learning as something social.1 Gaming, especially the World of Warcraft, serves as an exemplar of both inquiry learning and “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out” — the idea that learning is social and fun. Facebook (I know!) is their case study for “the collective” with “friend-of-a-friend networks” creating “a collective sense of belonging based on those shared interests.” Indeed, Thomas and Brown argue that Facebook and other social media will level out the unequal playing fields of our society.

They make the case that poor kids are most in need of exposure to the digital networked infrastructure so that 21st century opportunities are also available to them. Thomas and Brown call this process “concerted cultivation” whereby some communities devote resources to the learning and upbringing of their children. In the 20th century, this was localized, physical and tied to family and socio-economic groups. Not anymore, say Thomas and Brown.

The idea being that any kid with a computer now had access to the same kinds of resources and support as a wealthy kid might have had in the past because the internet erased any gatekeepers and made all that knowledge and learning accessible and fun and collective.

Okay, so this isn’t a book review of an outdated and even kind of quaint slice of the 2010s. I’ve been highlighting play because that’s the pathway to gamification that I really want to talk about in this series of posts. The authors are very explicit about play a the core learning mechanism.

Before I get there, though, let’s stick with the tech side of things. I started with this book, to try and remind everyone that there was loud and successful pressure from multiple angles to incorporate more tech in schools, to bring various online products into classrooms, and to embrace a particular brand of progressive2 pedagogy built around inquiry projects and discovery learning. Thinking of learning as play is a natural next step, logically, from this view of the world.

It was in the water

This is not the first time I’ve written about the pressure to adopt a tech-rich inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning. The very first post I wrote here at Scholastic Alchemy was an attempt to explain how phones ended up in schools. I’ll embed the Shift Happens video that was my own personal induction to the zeitgeist but I do recommend you read that whole piece.

2011, the year that A New Culture of Learning came out, was the same year that a little known entrepreneur in the Bay Area gave a TED talk called Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education. This was the birth of Khan Academy. MOOCs, you remember those, right? Well MOOCs were kicking off and about to revolutionize higher education. One of the founders of the MOOC Udacity3, claimed that there would only be 10 universities left in the world by 2060. Very serious people believed him. Schools needed to step up!

Within this milieu of techno-optimism, the way influential people talked about learning was just like what we see in A New Culture of Learning. Because we were all told that the internet democratized access to world-class information, communities came together to learn online without the need for schools or teachers, and because this was all a lot of fun, schools were hopelessly outdated. The best schools could do was lean-in, embrace the change, and get out of kids’ way as the digital networked world came in and taught them everything they needed to know. The Obama administration did its part (see here, too). Getting kids on the internet was a matter of equity and closing the achievement gap. Somebody get those Black and Hispanic kids some broadband!

In the years that followed, school systems around the country were touting how digitally integrated their students were. Mayors bragged about their 1-to-1 programs that put a laptop in every child’s hand. NYC lifted its ban on Cell Phones in schools 2015. Take it away mayor Bill DeBlasio:

Okay, parents! You got your wish! You wanted phones in schools and we got phones in schools.4 Now, DeBlasio makes it seem like this was primarily a safety and communications issue. Maybe it was. Even so, is this not part of the new culture of learning? If parents expect to be able to be in contact with their kids all day, then schools needed to be flexible and be able to be in contact with kids all day. The whole point of this movement was a kind of responsiveness and flexibility by schools to the “real world” and how it changed and shifted. By the time the pandemic rolled around, classrooms nationwide were already inundated with digital, networked technology though both the schools’ use of tech in teaching and permissive attitudes toward. The shift, however brief, to online instruction necessitated every kid get a computer and that’s more or less where we are today.

What happened after that was not the democratized information rich playful exploration predicted by Thomas and Brown. Rather, schools felt the need to suborn themselves to learning management systems, digital curriculum publishers, and an ever-increasing focus on student data. Instead of play, we got gamification. And that’s where I’ll go next week.

Thanks for reading!

1 Again, I should note that their own beloved Piaget did research in the 1920s about how children become more sociocentric and they seem unaware that Vygotsky was doing contemporaneous research on social learning. Both Piaget and Vygotsky are hugely influential educational theorists! It’s kind of par-for-the-course for an ed reform book to be somewhat ahistorical, though.

2 I don’t mean politically progressive here. Progressive education revolves around inquiry learning, discovery, exploration, and social development. The level of structure in progressive pedagogy varies widely with some versions preferring strictly guided inquires on narrow topics while others angle for child-centered choice and minimal adult interference. Everything from unschooling to Montessori to Park Schools to learning centers to flipped classrooms has been under the umbrella of progressive education at one time or another even though politically progressive movements have not always aligned with those approaches.

3 Udacity left the Higher Education market two years later, in 2013. In 2014 it began promoting for-profit online coding certification courses and augmented/virtual reality development. It was acquired by Accenture in 2024 and now mostly provides corporate training through an “AI-powered suite” called LearnVantage. As of 2026 there are still more than 30,000 colleges and universities in the world.

4 I admit that this part is a bit disconnected from play and inquiry but I want you to remember this the next time someone gets mad a schools for letting the phones in. Show them the speech. Schools were responding to parents’ pressure. They wanted 1) to be able to reach their kids for safety and communication reasons and 2) had a general sense that schools should do more with technology.