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...