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.
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.