Activity: Anybody can learn anything

Anyone can learn anything slide

When learning circles began in 2015, something we heard a lot of edtech companies say was that “anybody could learn anything, anywhere, for free” and that online learning would “democratize the world”. While these are nice sentiments, they are also very naive, because they don’t account for the very real barriers that many people face to learning.

There are both individual barriers (digital literacy, awareness of opportunities, and academic confidence) as well as structural barriers (racism, financial injustice, monolithic ideals of what constitutes “knowledge”) which prevent many people from being able to take full control over their own learning experiences.

One way to dig into these barriers to to revise this sentiment to make it more realistic.

Here’s how you play:

  1. Open this Google Slide and either make a copy or download it as a Powerpoint presentation so you can edit it.
  2. Read the slide out loud - how would you edit it to make it more accurate in your community?
  3. Have one person edit the sentence in real time. As the text gets longer, decrease the font size so that everything is still visible on a single slide (you may have to do this more than once).
  4. Add your slide in a comment to this thread! You can do that by taking a screenshot and uploading it as an image, or by pasting the link to your Google Slide (if you do this, make sure that you set permissions so that anyone who has the link can view).

Here’s what others have come up with:


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