Summary: Welcome to episode 188 ("Hong Kong in Crisis") of the EdTech Situation Room from August 26, 2020, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach) and Wesley Fryer (@wfryer) discussed surveillance, privacy and security force crackdowns in Hong Kong, a Kansas teacher's crowdsourced use of Google Sheets to track COVID-19 school closures, and Google's recent "Future of the Classroom" report. Forthcoming updates to Google Meet and Google Classroom, forthcoming upgrades to Google's home video casting technology, and the apparent loss of simplicity for Chromebooks amidst dual-boot and other options were also discussed. The alarming rise of "fruit loop conspiracy theory" advocates including winning candidates in U.S Congressional primary elections, the rise of political extremists in the United States on the wings of conspiracy theories, and the impact of sustained remote work mandates by tech companies on the Silicon Valley housing marked were highlighted. The dark side of the "sandbox game" RoBlox was also mentioned. Geeks of the Week included ethics in computing and science embodied in the "Asilomar AI Principles," the recent "Undivided Attention" podcast episode, "“When Media Was for You and Me," The Epic eBook of Web Tools and Apps, and Google Voice. 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 (normally) 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.
