A picket line  outside Ford’s Chicago assembly plant where workers went on strike.  Sarah Rice for HuffPost

Dear Commons Community,

The United Auto Workers union and Ford have reached a tentative agreement that could end the nearly six-week strike against the Detroit automaker, the union announced yesterday.

Good news.  Let’s hope the the strike against General Motors and Stellantis can also be settled soon.

Tony

AAccelerate 2023

Dear Commons Community,

I am at the OLC Accelerate Conference in Washington D.C. and will be on a panel this afternoon discussing  Generative AI in Higher Ed. 

A full description of this panel is below.  If you are at Accelerate, please stop by. 

The keynote this afternoon will be given by Dr. Brandeis Marshall, a faculty member at Spelman College and Founder of DataedX Group, a data ethics learning and development agency for educators, scholars and practitioners to counteract automated oppression efforts with culturally-responsive instruction and strategies.

Hope to see you!

Tony

——————————————————————–

A tearful Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to a charge of aiding and abetting false statements.  Credit…Pool photo by John Bazemore.

Dear Commons Community,

Attorney Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty yesterday to a felony charge over efforts to overturn Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia, tearfully telling the judge she looks back on that time with “deep remorse.”

Ellis, the fourth defendant in the case to enter into a plea deal with prosecutors, was a vocal part of Trump’s reelection campaign in the last presidential cycle and was charged alongside the Republican former president and 17 others with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law.

Ellis pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. She had been facing charges of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, and soliciting the violation of oath by a public officer, both felonies.  As reported by The Associated Press and The New York Times.

She rose to speak after pleading guilty, fighting back tears as she said she would have not have represented Trump after the 2020 election if she knew then what she knows now, claiming that she relied on lawyers with much more experience than her and failed to verify the things they told her.

“What I did not do but should have done, Your Honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were in fact true,” the 38-year-old Ellis said.

The guilty plea from Ellis comes just days after two other defendants, fellow attorneys Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, entered guilty pleas. That means three high-profile people responsible for pushing baseless legal challenges to Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory have agreed to accept responsibility for their roles rather than take their chances before a jury. A lower-profile defendant pleaded guilty last month.

Steve Sadow, Trump’s lead attorney in the Georgia case, used Ellis’ plea to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the racketeering charges Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought against all 19 defendants.

“For the fourth time, Fani Willis and her prosecution team have dismissed the RICO charge in return for a plea to probation,” he said. “What that shows is this so-called RICO case is nothing more than a bargaining chip for DA Willis.”

She was sentenced to five years of probation along with $5,000 in restitution, 100 hours of community service, writing an apology letter to the people of Georgia and testifying truthfully in trials related to this case.

The early pleas and the favorable punishment — probation rather than prison — could foreshadow similar outcomes for additional defendants who may see an admission of guilt and cooperation as their best hope for leniency. Even so, their value as witnesses against Trump is unclear given that their direct participation in unfounded schemes will no doubt expose them to attacks on their credibility and bruising cross-examinations should they testify.

The indictment in the sweeping case details a number of accusations against Ellis, including that she helped author plans on how to disrupt and delay congressional certification of the 2020 election’s results on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob of Trump supporters eventually overran the U.S. Capitol.

Ellis is also accused of urging state legislators to unlawfully appoint a set of presidential electors loyal to Trump at a hearing in Pennsylvania, and she later appeared with some of those lawmakers and Trump at a meeting on the topic at the White House. The indictment further says she similarly pushed state lawmakers to back false, pro-Trump electors in Georgia as well as Arizona and Michigan.

Prosecutor Daysha Young said in court Tuesday that Ellis attended a December 2020 meeting of Georgia state senators with Trump attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and with Georgia-based attorney Ray Smith. Ellis “intentionally aided and abetted” the other two as they made false statements to the lawmakers, including that more than 2,500 people convicted of felonies, more than 66,000 people who were under 18 and more than 10,000 dead people voted in the 2020 election in Georgia, Young said.

Before her plea, Ellis, who lives in Florida, was defiant, posting in August on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “The Democrats and the Fulton County DA are criminalizing the practice of law. I am resolved to trust the Lord.”

But she has been more critical of Trump since then, saying on conservative radio in September that she wouldn’t vote for him again, citing his “malignant, narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

Along with Giuliani, Ellis was a leading voice in the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, appearing frequently on television and conservative media to tell lies about widespread fraud that did not occur and spread misinformation and conspiracy theories.

She was censured in Colorado in March after admitting she made repeated false statements about the 2020 election.

That punishment was due in part to a Nov. 20, 2020, appearance on Newsmax, during which she said, “With all those states (Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia) combined we know that the election was stolen from President Trump, and we can prove that.”

Ellis and the other three pleaded guilty under Georgia’s first offender law. That means that if they complete their probation without violating the terms or committing another crime, their records will be wiped clean.

We are up to four flips in this case with more to come!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Ukraine War has revealed — if you don’t have an army of drones, you’re behind the times. Drones, the modern Swiss Army Knife, are a nation’s best eyes, ears, fists and helping hands. That’s why the US Military is pursuing the development of  drones and other advanced tech.  As reported by The Tomorrow Investor.

In the Ukrainian War, drones have proven an essential tool for offensive operations but also as humanitarian aid workers, army spotters, and mine clearers such as:

1. Delivering supplies and medicine into besieged areas or disasters zones.  
2. Measuring the temperature of a field throughout the day — using variations to spot metal, plastic or wooden mines buried underground.
3. Surveilling an area to make sure it’s safe to move through.

They are also cost-effective, easy-to-use tools that save human lives — both by doing dangerous jobs that otherwise humans would do, or by delivering life-saving tools, including portable defibrillators, where they are needed most.

They are generally the fastest way to move through urban areas — making them ideal first responders and scouts.

In the Ukraine War, they have already proven invaluable in helping limit the human cost of the conflict. And the intelligence they give the Ukrainian army has allowed the smaller force to hold its own against the much larger Russian army.  In addition, compared with other systems used by the military, drones are cheap enough to be considered a single-use disposable item.  And most importantly, they reduce the need for large-scale deploying boots on the ground.

Undoubtedly, drones will play a role in what’s to come next — whether gathering intelligence, or bringing aid to civilians caught in the crossfire.

And there are the companies like Draganfly that have perfected civilian uses of drones.  The world will soon have drones following medics and responding to 911 calls, with medical supplies as needed. They will also provide 24/7 security surveillance, deliverable wherever it is needed, no matter how dangerous the environment.

In sum, the world of tomorrow is being built by the armies of today.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I will be traveling to the Online Learning Consortium’s Annual ACCELERATE Conference in Washington, D.C. today.  The program looks quite good.  If you are going to the conference, I will be on a panel tomorrow (Wednesday) discussing Generative AI in Higher Education (2:15 pm – in Chesapeake 10-11-12). 

Hope to see you!

Tony

Tom Emmer.  Greg Nash/The Hill.

Dear Commons Community,

The race for the House speaker’s gavel is getting more complex with nine potential candidates throwing their hat into the nomination for the position.

One candidate with favorable backing is Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., who announced his candidacy Friday.

Emmer has already scored a major endorsement from ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who was ousted more than two weeks ago by eight Republicans voting with House Democrats.

It’s unclear whether Emmer will succeed where Jordan and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., failed — convincing the various factions within the GOP to unite around his leadership.  As reported by Fox News.

“He is the right person for the job. He can unite the conference,” McCarthy said. “He understands the dynamics of the conference. He also understands what it takes to win and keep a majority.”

“Our Conference remains at a crossroads, and the deck is stacked against us. We have no choice but to fight like hell to hold on to our House majority and deliver on our conservative agenda,” Emmer told Republican members of Congress in a letter Saturday about his bid for the speaker’s gavel.

Emmer said he would use teamwork, communication and respect to build on the success Republicans had taking back the House majority in 2022 and scoring legislative wins.

Allies of Emmer also pointed to his ability as a fundraiser. Emmer brought in $9.2 million for House races in the 2022 election cycle, including more than $4.8 million for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which he led at the time. Emmer has raised $7.6 million so far in 2023 for the 2024 election cycle.

Emmer faces a potential roadblock to his nomination from the hard-right side of the Republican caucus. Some reports have indicated former President Trump — who endorsed Jordan for speaker — is whipping members against voting for Emmer. It is unclear how this would affect the House speaker race.

Emmer is an attorney, former hockey player and coach, a father of seven and the No. 3 GOP lawmaker in the House this Congress.

He assumed the whip position from Steve Scalise, R-La., now the House majority leader — who also happened to be the GOP speaker nominee before Jordan.

Holding the position after leading the NRCC in the last election cycle, Emmer says he is a “team guy” from a “big hockey factory.”

The House majority whip said he learned to negotiate through his work as an attorney, but starting a youth hockey team in Delano, Minnesota, in the 1990s is where he cut his teeth in the art of getting people to work together.

“And we literally started because I recognized you’ve got all these competing entities, much like you have in Congress,” Emmer said. “I had to become a member of the local Youth Hockey board. Then I had to become a member of the board that ran the ice arena, so we could control our own ice time.

“Then I had to become a member of the District Hockey Board that was in charge of the region that our community was part of. Then I had to become part of … Minnesota Hockey, which is under the umbrella of USA Hockey. Why? Because we had to get them all talking to each other.”

Thirty years later, Emmer said, the program in the town that “was not recognized in the sport at all” is consistently making state championships.

The House majority whip was first bitten by the political bug in the early 1990s when Emmer, an attorney at the time, and wife Jackie were living in an old converted country hotel with “200-year-old” oak and maple trees in the front yard. The local public works team marked trees to be removed for a new road the next day.

The whip said his wife was “devastated” by the development because you “just don’t get stuff like that in town,” and Emmer called the mayor, a farmer, who drove to the congressman’s property at 10 p.m. “in his old, beat-up Cadillac Fleetwood” and put his lights on the trees.

The mayor whipped out his cellphone and called the head of public works to save the trees by moving the road 80 feet into the farm field.

“And after he did that, I was like, ‘Oh, well, this is the way it works,’ because the next thing that came was a sewer line that I didn’t need,” Emmer said. “We had two acres, we had a young family and I was getting assessed tens of thousands of dollars for a sewer that I didn’t need and I didn’t want.

“And that’s literally what got me involved running.”

Emmer’s candidacy comes after Jordan failed in his third bid for the speaker’s gavel.

House Republicans are starting from scratch to select a new candidate for speaker after Jordan was voted out of the race.

Republicans are expected to meet behind closed doors today for a candidate forum before a conference-wide election via secret anonymous ballot on Tuesday.

Emmer seems like a good candidate.  Maybe he can get a few Democrats to vote for him.

Tony

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Mark Garrett Cooper,  a professor of film and media studies at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, has a fine op-ed in today’s The Chronicle of Higher Education.  He reviews the disruption predictions of the past twenty years and concludes that it hasn’t happened and that our higher education is more resilient and has adjusted to all of the online technology that has been fostered upon it.   Here is his introduction.

“A decade ago, acolytes of Clayton M. Christensen’s trademark “disruption” fancied that online course delivery would reduce costs and expand access, upending higher education’s traditional model. They were met with skepticism. The MOOC pitch seemed to subordinate quality to scale and profit. It underestimated the complexity of postsecondary education’s mission and the diversity of its constituencies. And MOOCs threated livelihoods. Professors recoiled at being likened to taxi drivers made obsolete by Uber (while entrepreneurs delighted in that comparison). A notable faction, with Cathy N. Davidson as its most visible champion, promoted a less macho and corporate but equally sweeping digital revolution.

For all the Sturm und Drang, the result was wide-ranging experimentation with online course delivery at both traditional institutions and ed-tech start-ups. Mid-2016 found ed-tech insiders like Phil Hill asserting that “these days, no one considers MOOCs to be the future of education or a threat to the modern university.” Yet it was also clear that online approaches were changing instruction on traditional campuses as well as in nonresidential and nondegree programs, and that they would continue to do so.

An academic suspicion of online transformation persists, but the landscape has changed. While the former allergy to all kinds of ed tech occasionally bubbles back up to the surface, read deeper and you’ll find nuanced insight into what will and won’t change. Online and hybrid approaches are now part of the mix. If your campus did not have an office to support online instruction before the pandemic, it does now. Per a 2021 EdSurge column, the age of the modern MOOC began with 300,000 learners taking free Stanford classes and grew, over a decade, to 220 million learners. A 2022 McKinsey report found consolidation in the online degree market, with large providers like Southern New Hampshire University, Liberty University, Western Governors University, and Grand Canyon University seeing major gains, while enrollments at other institutions modestly declined. Online higher ed is a growing market, but a mature one.

Cooper cites Michael D. Smith, a Carnegie Mellon professor of information technology and marketing. In a recent essay and in his new book, The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World (MIT Press), to flesh out the issues and concludes.

“For Smith the successes of Uber, Netflix, and Amazon predict the disruption of higher education (exempting the top end of the market) because those services show how networked computing can make distribution both drastically more efficient and radically more individual. He is correct that they shift expectations on content delivery. Students will expect course components that look and feel like lectures to be available anywhere, anytime. As those of us who have taught in that modality know, asynchronous delivery accommodates hangovers as well as challenging student schedules.

But the traditional college experience can stretch to accommodate those changes. For online delivery to truly “remake” higher ed, we would need to give up campus scouting trips, move-in day, parents’ weekend, homecoming, and all the rites of passage and rituals of belonging that shape campus life. I suspect that such a turn of events would not be experienced as abundance.”

Cooper makes a number of coherent important comments.  However, overall enrollments in higher education have been declining for several years in part due to demographics but also due to the changing style of attaining a college degree. The majority of those who attend college today are not full-time residential undergraduate students who expect to graduate in four years.  Graduate students, community college, part-time four-year college students and those enrolled in for-profit institutions are in the majority. They combine college, working full or part-time and taking care of families.  For them, the online learning modality is a lifeline and it may not have “disrupted” higher education but it sure changed it.  This trend will continue as newer online technologies (i.e., AI) evolve.

Tony

Samantha Woll

Dear Commons Community,

Samantha Woll, a Detroit synagogue president was found stabbed to death outside her home yesterday, police said. The motive wasn’t known.

Emergency medical personnel declared Woll, dead at the scene, Cpl. Dan Donakowski said.

“While at the scene, police officers observed a trail of blood leading officers to the victim’s residence, which is where the crime is believed to have occurred,” Donakowski said.

Woll, 40, had led the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue since 2022 and was a former aide to Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin and campaign staffer for Attorney General Dana Nessel, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Police have not identified a possible motive and are investigating, the Free Press reported.

Police found Woll around 6:30 a.m. after someone called to alert them of a person lying on the ground unresponsive, the Free Press reported.

Detroit Police Chief James E. White said the killing has left many unanswered questions, and he asked the public to be patient as investigators examine all available evidence.

“Over the course of the last several hours, the DPD has mobilized many of its resources and has been leveraging every law enforcement and community resource it has to help further the investigation,” White said in a statement released Saturday night. “An update on the investigation will be forthcoming tomorrow.”

In a statement, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Woll’s death was heartbreaking.

“She was a source of light, a beacon in her community who worked hard to make Michigan a better place,” the governor said.

Michigan State Police were assigned to support the Detroit Police Department in the investigation, Whitmer said.

Nessel issued a statement on X, formerly Twitter, saying she was “shocked, saddened and horrified.”

“Sam was as kind a person as I’ve ever known,” Nessel said. “She was driven by her sincere love of her community, state and country. Sam truly used her faith and activism to create a better place for everyone.”

Slotkin also commented on X, saying she was “heartbroken at this news.”

Mayor Mike Duggan issued a statement saying he was “devastated” to learn of Woll’s death.

“Sam’s loss has left a huge hole in the Detroit community,” the mayor said. “This entire city joins with her family and friends in mourning her tragic death.”

This is a travesty. Depending upon the motive it might become more of a travesty!

Tony

Martin Scorsese and  Osage Nation leaders and consultants who worked on the film.  Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

On Friday, my wife Elaine and I saw the film “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a story about the 1920s Osage murders based on David Grann’s best-selling book of the same name.  I read the book which recounts a dark and painful chapter of Osage history.  It is a page-turner and a bit better than the movie.  After the Osage were forced from their homelands and relocated to a reservation in present-day Oklahoma, they eventually discovered vast oil deposits beneath their new land. Those oil deposits made the Osage extraordinarily wealthy — and also made them the targets of a sinister murder plot.

Before production of “Killers of the Flower Moon” began, the Osage Nation expressed their concerns and signaled that they wanted to be involved in bringing their history to the big screen. Director Martin Scorsese and his team met with members of the tribe on multiple occasions, and ultimately worked with them to ensure that the depictions of Osage people and culture felt as true to life as possible.

“I was worried we were going to get exploited again — not so much in losing resources and our land, but in the telling of the story of how we lost our resources and land,” former Osage Nation Chief Jim Gray told CNN. Now that they’ve seen “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Gray and other Osages say the film is all the better for the collaboration.

Lily Gladstone, who plays Osage woman Mollie Burkhart, and Scorsese on the set of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”Apple Original Films -CNN.

In 2019, Scorsese and his team met with Osage Nation Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear to discuss “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Chief Standing Bear offered up resources such as the tribe’s language department that could assist in the film’s production, the Osage News reported at the time.

That same year, Scorsese met with residents of Oklahoma’s Gray Horse community, many of whom are descendants of the Osage victims who were killed in the 1920s. Jim Gray was among those in attendance.

Gray is the great-grandson of Henry Roan, an Osage man whose killing ultimately clued federal investigators into the culprit behind the murder scheme. In the meeting with Scorsese, Gray said he encouraged the director to explore more deeply who these Osage victims were.

“Be the director to make a film that this industry hasn’t seen. The one that they’re going to look at and say, ‘That’s the one we got right,’” Gray said he conveyed to Scorsese at the time.

Gray said he can’t be sure what kind of impact his words ultimately had on Scorsese. But as the director has said in interviews, the original script was significantly overhauled. Like Grann’s 2017 book, the film was initially going to focus on special agent Tom White and how his investigation led to the birth of the FBI, with Leonardo DiCaprio set to play White.

“After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the White guys,” Scorsese said in an interview with Time. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”

Scorsese and DiCaprio eventually decided that the heart of the film was instead the relationship between Mollie and Ernest Burkhart — the Osage woman whose family members were mysteriously dying off and her White settler husband. DiCaprio was recast as Ernest Burkhart, while Jesse Plemons was brought in to play the FBI agent.

“Killers of the Flower Moon” still centers largely on a White man — a point that some Osages have criticized.

“As an Osage, I really wanted this to be from the perspective of Mollie and what her family experienced,” Christopher Côté, an Osage language consultant on the film, told The Hollywood Reporter at the Los Angeles premiere this week. “But I think it would take an Osage to do that.”

Côté, who acknowledged that Scorsese “did a great job representing our people,” also criticized the portrayal of Mollie and Burkhart’s marriage.

“This history is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart and they kind of give him this conscience and kind of depict that there’s love,” Côté added. “But when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love. That’s not love, that’s just beyond abuse.”

(Scorsese said in an interview with The New Yorker that the descendants of Mollie and Ernest Burkhart told him that the couple was in love.)

Countless Osage people worked on “Killers of the Flower Moon”and their mark is evident throughout, said Chad Renfro, the tribe’s ambassador for the film and a consulting producer on the project.

The first frame of the film displays Osage orthography, Renfro said, and the language is spoken by Osage and non-Osage actors. The characters wear traditional clothing made by Osage artisans, and the scenery depicted is the Osage reservation.

“It’s not every day that a small Native nation gets this platform,” Renfro said. “This is a horrific story, and it is something that is really hard for us to watch. But it is thrilling to say the least to see it come to life in such a way.”

Hearing the Osage Nation language spoken by A-list actors like Robert De Niro was especially powerful, Gray said. It’s a testament to efforts of Osage language consultants and coaches, as well as the resources the tribe has invested in revitalizing its language.

“When (De Niro) starts talking Osage, my spine stiffened up in the movie theater,” Gray said. “He was convincing. As an Osage, watching him pull that off — knowing he would never have been able to do that had there not been an Osage assigned to him teaching him how to speak Osage … that was impressive.”

Osage consultants weighed in on a myriad of details, from wardrobe to traditional customs, resulting in a level of authenticity that Gray said he hasn’t seen in a mainstream Hollywood project about Native people.

“The clothing, the designs, the fabrics, the way the Osage woman wore her blanket. Little things that most everyone is going to just ignore,” Gray added. “But if you’re an Osage sitting in the audience, you’re gonna catch things. A lot of little things.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” might have looked different had an Osage filmmaker been at the helm. But for the moment, Gray said he’s focusing on how all the time and effort that the Osage Nation poured into the film helped strengthen it. And he and Renfro are hopeful it will set a new industry standard.

“It is setting the bar really high for things like this going forward,” Renfro added. “I hope that it will encourage Hollywood and anybody who’s considering making films about other cultures, period, to do the same.”

Good movie.  Well worth the price of admission!

You can find a full review of this movie in The New York Times here.

Tony