Nurturing critical thinking in general education: the challenges of generative artificial intelligence (90mins)

Speaker: Prof. Thomas Hun Tak Lee (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

In this talk, speaker will show that the development of critical thinking crucially involves the complex processes of reading for in-depth understanding and articulating complex ideas with words, sentences, and connected discourse. These psycholinguistic processes, which are being increasingly challenged by the advent of generative AI, will need to be preserved and enhanced as an integral part of humanities education, in order for critical thinking to continue to be nurtured.

Imagine, Create, and Teach a GE course at UM (30mins)

Discussion led by Prof. Garry Wong (FHS)

Bio of Speaker:

Prof. Thomas Lee received his BA in English Literature from Swarthmore College, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from UCLA. His research interests lie in language and cognition, with particular reference to language learnability and first language acquisition of Cantonese and Mandarin. He is currently director of Office of University General Education, Chinese University of Hong Kong, having formerly served in various roles at the university, as Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Arts, Chairperson ofthe Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, and Chairperson of the Senate Committee on Language Enhancement. Professor Lee is on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including Language Acquisition (Taylor and Francis) andContemporary Linguistics (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).