Social media platforms are abuzz with discussions, debates, and even “meltdowns” following the release of China's DeepSeek R1, an open-source AI reasoning model that has demonstrated capabilities comparable to OpenAI's ChatGPT-o1 especially on reasoning tasks, mathematics, and coding.
There has always been a fundamental difference in the culture of education between the East and West, with the East focusing primarily on memorizing the correct answer and the West emphasizing innovation. This is an overgeneralization, of course, but the article here suggests that the East's strength in STEM education inherently places the West at a disadvantage to which we must "catch up," lest we be subsumed by Chinese AI literacy supremacy.
I don't think it's quite that simple. The most challenging aspects of using AI is asking the right questions, designing the optimal combination of resources to achieve a goal, and using tools in ways for which they were not intended to discover something new (process/product). The West has historically been better at those kinds of things, and given that the East has been indoctrinated into a mindset of not asking questions that will get them in trouble, I suppose the West doesn't have to learn how to do that.
OK, I don't have the data to back any of that up, but these are the refrains I have heard over the years whenever discussions emerge about teaching to multicultural audiences.
There has always been a fundamental difference in the culture of education between the East and West, with the East focusing primarily on memorizing the correct answer and the West emphasizing innovation. This is an overgeneralization, of course, but the article here suggests that the East's strength in STEM education inherently places the West at a disadvantage to which we must "catch up," lest we be subsumed by Chinese AI literacy supremacy.
I don't think it's quite that simple. The most challenging aspects of using AI is asking the right questions, designing the optimal combination of resources to achieve a goal, and using tools in ways for which they were not intended to discover something new (process/product). The West has historically been better at those kinds of things, and given that the East has been indoctrinated into a mindset of not asking questions that will get them in trouble, I suppose the West doesn't have to learn how to do that.
OK, I don't have the data to back any of that up, but these are the refrains I have heard over the years whenever discussions emerge about teaching to multicultural audiences.
I worry by the time we train teachers the system will change completely