Teenagers’ mathematics and reading skills are in an unprecedented decline across dozens of countries and COVID school closures are only partly to be blamed, the OECD said on Tuesday in its latest survey of global learning standards.
Teenagers’ mathematics and reading skills are in an unprecedented decline across dozens of countries and COVID school closures are only partly to be blamed, the OECD said on Tuesday in its latest survey of global learning standards.
I feel like kids (hell, I would also) have been smarter if they used platforms like Reddit/Lemmy etc to learn and discourse constantly. I learn way more in these environments than I ever learned in school. I write (not quite essays but still extended body of writing) just by willingly engaging here. You would have had to pull teeth most of the time to get anything out of me in any comparable sense back then. YMMV
Part of that may be just that you’re older and more mature now than when you were a high schooler. Encouraging kids to go on Lemmy and Reddit would just lead to most of them screwing around and looking at memes, not learning.
While some of that is true, as a kid I got involved in online forums and the exposure to ideas there, I think, did help broaden my horizons and spark interest in topics that school would not necessarily have cultivated in me in the same way.
As a kid I got super into runescape. Screwing around? Certainly. But also talking with people, studying guides, learning routes for xp farming and I guess even basic economics while saving for a party hat lol. Spent time on the forums as well.
I wonder if engaging with all that text based content made me more inclined to stick around forum style sites such as lemmy, or if even all the way back then that type of experience just appealed to me because of the type of person I am.
I learned to type playing Everquest. I could barely manage 15 WPM when I got the game, and in a year or two of playing, with no other real typing going on, I could do 100+ WPM. Schools in my area hadn’t really adopted computers in classrooms; there was a computer lab but no real computer related classes, and there were computers in the library for research, but I didn’t have any real exposure… until Everquest.
Typing of the Dead definitely upped my speed back in the day.
Same experience with EverQuest.
I credit that game with helping me get over my shyness.
I wonder, what differentiates us from the teens who’d just look at memes and nothing else?
Some of it is probably pre-existing interest, but a large part of it is just luck/accessibility. I only stumbled into forums while looking for online free games to play. The game had a forum that had trending forum topics on the sidebar, and eventually curiousity overtook me.
I did a decent amount of learning as a teen. I’d have done more if not for the depression
Nah, it was lack of awareness of it (like nobody ever “showed” it to me so I didn’t know to look for it) and lack of a good 3rd party app to make it palatable. Apollo was revolutionary to me when I discovered it in that regard.
There’s the underlying basis that, on Reddit etc, you’re generally viewing and discussing topics that you’re already interested in, which is a massive hurdle.
I’m presuming you haven’t learned much about the Kardashians on Reddit. You could, if you cared about them. I don’t see how it’s meaningfully different for math or anything else.