EdTech Situation Room Episode 157

Welcome to episode 157 of the EdTech Situation Room from December 3, 2019, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach) and Wesley Fryer (@wfryer) discussed the ascendency of Sundar Pichai to the throne of Alphabet, research revealing sophisticated and ongoing Russian propaganda efforts to weaponize social media to foment division and polarization in the United States, CyberMonday deals over the weekend for U.S technology consumers, and the 10 year anniversary / birthday of ChromeOS. The impeding selloff of all .org domains to a private equity company, the politics of local laws on technology platforms revealed by Apple's new map of Russia including (illegally) annexed Crimea, Apple's removal of customer reviews from its online store, and the announcement of the GitHub Security Lab to provide bug bounties for open source platforms were also highlighted. Additional topics included the benefits of letting milk cows use VR headsets (in Russia), IBM's use of machine learning algorithms to discover more ancient, giant etchings in the earth (similar to the Nazca Lines) using tons of satellite imagery, and the optimistic news from Hong Kong following recent elections fueled by student protests and the use of a variety of encryption apps to organize and remain anonymous in the burgeoning Chinese surveillance state. The imminent removal of inactive Twitter accounts and availability of those channel IDs and Google's struggles with the Stadia gaming platform rounded out the show. Geeks of the Week included BlueGriffon (a free 64 bit WYSIWYG webpage editor), a recent podcast conversation by Richard Byrne (@rmbyrne) with Dr. Scott McLeod (@mcleod), and the amazing "Post It" app for iOS and Android. Our show was live streamed and archived simultaneously on YouTube Live as well as our Facebook Live page via StreamYard.com. Please follow us on Twitter @edtechSR for updates, and join us LIVE on Wednesday nights (unless we have a schedule change like tonight) if you can at 10 pm Eastern / 9 pm Central / 8 pm Mountain / 7 pm Pacific or 3 am UTC. All shownotes are available on http://edtechSR.com/links.