Dr Flavius Akerele III's The E Team Education blog

  By Dr. Flavius A. B. Akerele III, EdD, MBA & Cody (ChatGPT) Meet Cody. Well, sort of. I asked my AI partner what he thought his avatar would look like. This is what he came up with. Apparently, Cody has better office décor than I do. 😂 More importantly, the exercise led to an interesting conversation about how humans and AI can work together without outsourcing the very thing that makes the partnership valuable: human judgment and critical thinking. The other evening, I asked my AI partner a question. Yes, I said partner. I have been using ChatGPT for some time now, and somewhere along the way I even gave it a name: Cody. I asked Cody: “What are your thoughts on AI, and how can we better work together?” Part of the answer stopped me: “AI works much better when the human doesn’t surrender authorship.” That got my attention. Because much of the conversation surrounding artificial intelligence seems stuck between two extremes. Either AI is going to rev...

  Microaggressions are often described as “subtle verbal, behavioral, or environmental slights directed toward members of marginalized groups”. They may be intentional, but very often they are not. And perhaps that's what makes them so complicated. Most people don't come to work thinking, “How can I make one of my coworkers uncomfortable today?” Yet seemingly small comments, assumptions, jokes, interruptions, exclusions, or differences in how people are treated can accumulate over time. What appears insignificant to the person doing it may feel very different to the person experiencing it repeatedly. Research and mental-health resources associate repeated microaggressions with stress, fatigue, decreased motivation, mistrust, and professional consequences. https://mhanational.org/resources/microaggressions That is a tiring way to spend your workday, especially when you actually like people and want to enjoy collaborating with them. I don't think the solution is to...

  There is a climate of fear developing in higher education. And regardless of where you stand politically, that should concern us. Universities have always operated within political, financial, and social pressures. That isn't new. What feels different today is the degree to which institutional leaders, faculty, and staff appear increasingly concerned about what they can say, what they can support, what programs they can maintain, and even what opinions they can publicly acknowledge. Sometimes the safest response seems to be silence, and I understand why. Institutions have employees to protect, students to serve, budgets to balance, donors to consider, and increasingly uncertain sources of funding. Leaders have a responsibility to consider consequences. But there is another question worth asking: what happens when caution becomes fear? Higher education is supposed to be one of the places where difficult ideas can be examined, challenged, debated, researched, and someti...

  There are important conversations happening around us every day. Social issues. Education. Leadership. Race. Politics. Workplace culture. Economics. Community. We cannot, and probably should not, ignore all of them. That doesn't mean we need to be ten toes down on every issue that crosses our screen. Sometimes listening is more valuable than speaking. Sometimes we don't know enough to have an informed opinion. But meaningful progress requires meaningful discussion. And meaningful discussion becomes nearly impossible when someone isn't actually interested in discussing the issue at hand. I encountered this recently during what I thought was a productive online conversation. Different perspectives were being shared, people disagreed, and that was perfectly fine. Then someone repeatedly tried to steer the conversation somewhere else. Not because the new question helped us examine the original issue more deeply. It didn't. It distracted from it, and there is ...

  There are many ways to express gratitude, but sometimes I think we make it more complicated than it needs to be. I'm talking about simply being thankful to be alive. It is easy to become consumed by everything that is going wrong, everything that has gone wrong, and everything happening around us that we simply cannot control. If we aren't careful, those things can become so loud that we forget about everything that is still good. Find time to decompress. Spend time with people you love. Laugh. Enjoy the little things. Take care of yourself. And occasionally remind yourself that you get to breathe air for another day. Perhaps one of the best ways we can express gratitude for life is to actually live it , not merely survive it while worrying about everything we cannot change. Be blessed. Stay healthy. And do your best to be happy. The little things matter. Dr. Flavius Akerele, EdD, MBA #Gratitude #Life #WellBeing #Perspective #BePresent #TheLittleThin...

  Navigating High Achievers in the Workplace When I was younger, I was sometimes accused of being arrogant at work. Maybe occasionally I was. Age and experience have taught me enough humility to acknowledge that possibility. But I also know that sometimes what was perceived as arrogance was simply confidence. I was educated, prepared, good at what I did, and comfortable expressing what I knew. That distinction matters. Because managers routinely encounter employees who are highly capable, highly confident, or both. And if we mistake confidence for arrogance, or arrogance for competence, we can make poor leadership decisions in either direction. So how do we tell the difference? Arrogance, Confidence, and Competence They can look remarkably similar from a distance. A confident employee trusts their abilities. They can usually explain what they know without needing everyone else to know less. They can accept correction; they acknowledge limitations and learn from som...

  What does professional networking mean to you? Is it reaching out when you need a job? Asking someone for an introduction? Connecting because someone has information that might benefit you? Or is networking supposed to be something more? I've been thinking lately about how many ways we now have to connect with one another. LinkedIn, professional associations, conferences, email, social media, alumni networks, the opportunities are almost endless. Yet I wonder whether we're actually networking more or simply contacting more people. There is a difference. Real networking, at least as I understand it, should involve the genuine exchange of ideas, information, opportunities, and sometimes assistance, with no guarantee that anything comes back to us. Sometimes you make an introduction simply because two people should know each other. Sometimes you send someone an article because you think they'll find it useful. Sometimes you tell someone about an opportunity eve...