The second module of the E-learning ecologies course was dedicated to the concepts of active knowledge making and the shift in the balance of agency. The concepts highlights the fundamental paradigm shift from knowledge being created in a top-down process, through hierarchical content transition, where the student is a consumer who is expected to accept the teacher's ultimate expertise and absorb, memorize and retell the content of manuals; to a new paradigm, where the learning process and the knowledge is created with the active participation of the learner, information is pulled from the wide range of sources available in the social environment, processed and designed by the learner in personalized knowledge artifacts.

Gamification defined by Werbach & Hunter as use of game elements and game-design techniques in non game contexts is an very popular active learning concept. But why are games valuable both in education and serious business context?

According to Constance Steinkuehler an American professor of education and game-based learning at the University of California–Irvine, video games are very well designed both for learning and also to capture interest, and for this reason they provide an easy context for studying interest driven learning, allowing researchers to look at what it means when kids are actually engaged and care about the subject matter.

Tapping into what makes learners engaged, motivated, empowered and connected and using this information to create learning environments and experiences which facilitate the process of learners becoming active knowledge producers and going away from the sheer consumer of knowledge this is what gamification can do in the learning ecologies. Games for this reason are not the end but a very handy tool to reconfigure learning processes.

VIDEO Constance Steinkuehler on Interest-Driven Learning (Big Thinkers Series)

Kevin Werbach, Dan Hunter: For the win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business, Wharton Digital Press, 2012.

Wood, Lincoln & Reiners, Torsten. (2015). Gamification. 3039-3047. 10.4018/978-1-4666-5888-2.ch297.