Around 2015, David Gauntlett started distributing little printed cards at workshops in a corner of British media studies that most people outside the field were unaware of. Every card contained a question, a concept, and a theorist. Pupils would argue over them, pair them, and shuffle them. More than a seminar, it appeared to be a parlour game. In retrospect, it’s difficult to ignore the scene’s prophecy.
Gauntlett had no intention of creating edtech. The dull weight of traditional media studies, with its fetishized experts, passive audiences, and dry readings of texts students didn’t really care about, was the issue he was attempting to address after years of writing about it. He had already made the case that audiences weren’t empty vessels in his 2007 manifesto, which he later dubbed Media Studies 2.0. They produced goods. They performed, posted, and remixed. Therefore, it must have seemed ridiculous to him to lecture students about their own identities when he started teaching identity theory. It made more sense to use cards. It was possible to touch, trade, and play with cards.
He didn’t explicitly state it, but anyone observing could sense that he had stumbled into the same intuition that businesses like Quizlet, Kahoot, and Duolingo would soon become multibillion-dollar enterprises. Make learning enjoyable. Make use of choices, loops, and modest rewards. Instead of letting the student absorb the information, let them use it.
Gauntlett might object to the analogy. In its most cynical form, gamification consists of engagement metrics disguised as pedagogy, such as streaks and badges. Points were never the focus of his cards. He spent years working with the LEGO Foundation on the idea that building things with your hands sharpens your mind, so it’s no surprise that they were more spiritually similar to LEGO. From the Media Studies 2.0 essay to the theory cards to the LEGO research, there is a recurring theme in his work that essentially states that people learn by creating rather than by receiving.
And when gamification succeeds, that is, subtly, the philosophical foundation of its success. It feels like a tiny loop closing when you watch a sixth-form student in Manchester or Faisalabad browse through a Quizlet deck on Gauntlett’s own identity theory. Yes, there are decks of that kind; you can find them in a matter of seconds. In the game he partially invented, the theorist turns into a card.
None of these existed in the format that Gauntlett would have recognized when he first wrote about identity construction, including the Studocu responses, the YouTube explainers from Mrs. Fisher with her 83,000 views, and the WordPress notes from a Guilsborough school. However, they all use the same reasoning. Knowledge is something you take in bits and pieces, put it back together, and perform it. He referred to it as identity through media consumption. It turns out that media consumption education adheres to the same guidelines.
Observing all of this gives the impression that universities themselves are still lagging behind. There are still lecture halls. Even now, reading lists are sent out via email in PDF format, which no one opens until the week before the test. In the meantime, the real learning—the kind that sticks—occurs more often on phones during bus rides, in tappable decks, brief quizzes, and brief videos. Gauntlett was the first to recognize the shape of this. It’s another matter entirely whether he would approve of each version.
The quiet utility of the cards themselves is what endures. Not ostentatious. not based on algorithms. It’s just a little thing asking you to do something. There are moments when the future of education resembles a deck of cards waiting to be picked up on a seminar table rather than a screen.
