HOW IT IS LIKE TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR? A FRAMEWORK TO ANALYSING MULTIVOICEDNESS OF MEANING IN GAMIFIED LEARNING PLATFORMS
Authors: Rughinis Razvan , Rosner Daniel , Matei Stefania 
Published: February 2023

In this paper, we consider the potential of gamified platforms to teach young people entrepreneurial values. We start from exploring a specific learning environment, #ritmdebusiness (Eng. #businessrhythm), designed to increase visibility of self-driven careers, while promoting the diversity of trajectories, motivations and models in successful Romanian businesses. The environment is supported by a digital platform used to assemble stories of leading entrepreneurs whose experience and products are made to account as subject of discussion. The gamified component of the platform consists in a competition organized to award users who propose valuable improvements and extensions of the presented products. Therefore, #ritmdebusiness also functions as a campaign developed both to enrich public discourse around the values of business creation and to increase awareness on the role of IT instruments in developing successful entrepreneurial projects.
The digital platform unfolds a jointly constructed culture in which different actors collaboratively establish entrepreneurship as the referential system of ongoing interactions. The platform facilitates actions in which the meaning of entrepreneurship is socially defined and negotiated through locally orchestrated modes of engagement. In this sense, #ritmdebusiness becomes a medium to invite questioning on how entrepreneurship might be known, approached and learned, and on what type of resources might be integrated in the process. We consider that analytically employing the concept of voices, understood as an accountable embodiment of "perspective, conceptual horizon, intention and worldview" (Engestrom, 1995, p. 199) represents an effective practice in the design and implementation of powerful learning environments.
By exploring different interactional patterns and discursive episodes in the production, use and evaluation of #ritmdebusiness digital environment, we propose a framework to analyse multivoicedness (Wertsch, 1991) in gamified learning platforms. We claim that voices are embedded in the design and rhetoric of the digital medium, becoming a function of framing discourse, positioning actors, mediating actions, and building technological infrastructure. Accordingly, we develop a typology that differentiate between (1) discursively-framed voices (voices that are intentionally introduced to stage subjective positions of various actors), (2) relationally-emergent voices (voices that arise in sequences of interactions and relations between various actors), (3) action-based voices (voices that develop in processes of acting upon the platform and engaging with it), (4) objectified-constructed voices (voices of objects, digital artefacts and technological infrastructure integrated within the platform), and (5) performative meta-voices (voices resulting in how the platform acts in the world as an independent reality). We illustrate how these types of voices operate in achieving the meaning of entrepreneurship within #ritmdebusiness media platform, thus theorizing on how learning process is being constituted by a multiplicity of dynamic and interacting cultural, institutional and socio-economic settings.