Imagine the following scenario: A fifth-grade science class has just begun and the teacher makes a surprise announcement — today the students will be dissecting a frog.
I’m sure you remember dissecting a frog as a kid — the sour-pickle odor of formaldehyde, the sharp scalpels slicing into rubbery skin. You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to grimace a bit thinking about it.
But here comes the paradox. In this scenario, like-minded fifth-graders who are queasy about cutting open animals are excited to participate in this dissection. Indeed, no animal was harmed when the specimens were collected. What’s more, the teacher promises the students that they won’t have to clean up a messy station afterward.
How? Thanks to the paradigm-shifting creations of zSpace, an educational VR/AR company, students can harmlessly dissect an animal on an interactive screen known as the zSpace 200. Students wear a special pair of glasses equipped with sensors and use a stylus that allows them to engage with a virtual image that can be turned or even disassembled.
By importing VR/AR into the classroom, one minute students can explore the anatomy and organs of an animal without harming it, and the very next build and test circuits or set up experiments that test Newton’s laws.
For young students who have been inundated by tech in almost every other domain of their lives, this form of learning comes naturally.
“Kids say, ‘Well of course it should be like this.’ They believe they should be able to reach into a screen, grab something, pull it out, and interact with it,” said Dave Chavez, chief technology officer of zSpace.
While VR is often discussed as a gaming technology, the gaming applications of VR are simply the first wave in a sequence that will profoundly shape the way we experience content over the next five years. Educational startups have been working on VR material for classrooms ranging from kindergarten through medical school. Current estimates project that the global edtech market will reach $252 billion by 2020; VR will capture a big chunk of this pie.
The next step in the democratization of knowledge is VR.
As for parents (and the rest of us), we continue to adopt the tech slowly. In 2016, only 6 percent of Americans will own a VR headset. While this can be attributed to cost and other barriers to entry that are being knocked down as the technology evolves, learning more about how VR is being used to reshape student engagement and communication teaches us more about how it will soon shape our digital experiences by serving as a conduit for previously impossible connections.
“Virtual reality puts people first,” said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after his recent demo onstage at Oculus’ Connect Conference. “It’s all about who you’re with. Once you’re in there, you can do anything you want together — travel to Mars, play games, fight with swords, watch movies or teleport home to see your family. You have an environment where you can experience anything.”
The democratization of experiences
Throughout history, monumental developments have expanded society’s access to education. In the early first millennium BCE, the first written alphabets appeared and provided an easy medium for recording information relevant to the common good, whether it be a religious text or a business transaction.
The following centuries witnessed the creation of books and libraries, which then allowed for written content to be stored and accessed by more than just the super-wealthy.
Johannes Guttenberg’s invention of the moveable-type printing press in the 1450s made it even cheaper and more efficient to publish and purchase books on subjects like philosophy, mathematics and commerce. In the 20th century, the computer and internet transformed educational access more than any other past advancement, democratizing the world’s collective knowledge to anyone with a connection.
A student’s capacity to discover and learn will no longer be limited to the environment around them.
The next step in the democratization of knowledge is VR. This emerging educational platform will make it possible for students to virtually visit museums in other continents, communicate in virtual learning spaces with fellow students in Johannesburg, Beijing or Sydney or attend a lecture at a prestigious university thousands of miles away. It can not be overstated how important this is for the future of education — a student’s capacity to discover and learn will no longer be limited to the environment around them.
From a UNICEF Teacher’s Handbook based on facilitating the education of children around the world:
“Children learn best from experience. Children learn by doing, using their senses, exploring their environment of people, things, places and events. They learn from first-hand and concrete experiences as well as vicarious forms of experiences. Children do not learn as effectively when they are passive. Active engagement with things and ideas promotes mental activity that helps students retain new learning and integrate it with what they already know. If it is not possible to always provide concrete, first-hand experiences for the student, efforts must always be exerted so that the student will be able to understand the concept in a clear and concrete way.”
With educational VR, it will always be possible to provide concrete first-hand experiences. While the current cost of adoption is too high for VR to reach under-funded schools, it will eventually decrease, as is almost always the case with new technologies. In the time that it takes, I’d bet the world becomes a fully connected place.
The internet democratized knowledge, VR will democratize experiences. It will continue to shrink an increasingly globalized world and facilitate better communication and collaboration across physical spaces. It will be the next innovation in the transmission of knowledge that not only shapes how we learn, but how we conduct business and maintain relationships with our friends, family and like-minded people, wherever they may be.
How VR enhances communication and collaboration
Increasingly, the success of businesses hinges on their ability to communicate and collaborate.
VR is the perfect medium for achieving these ends. Because VR will become a more and more integral part of the business world, the earlier students are exposed to non-gaming uses of VR, the more prepared they will be to interact in the virtual work spaces of tomorrow.
Some students learn best by hearing, others by seeing. With VR, you get the best of both. Educational visionaries that develop educational VR hardware and software are not just improving learning; they are rethinking it altogether.
One of the features that distinguishes the aforementioned zSpace 200 from other VR educational technologies is that students can easily collaborate and speak with one another while using their VR computer.
“The most profound thing I’ve ever heard a teacher say is that many technologies build a barrier between us and the kids but this seems not to,” said Chavez.
Far too often, VR is mistaken to be a solitary, lonely experience.
But even VR platforms that place the user in virtual worlds are not necessarily isolating experiences. Immersive VR Education, a developer headquartered in Ireland, has created a social learning platform called Engage. Engage gives educators the tools to create their own lessons and immersive experiences, all without needing to commit a line of code. Inside these immersive lessons, teachers and students can connect and use collaborative tools like an interactive whiteboard.
“In virtual reality when the avatar is two feet away from you, it really feels like they are two feet away from you,” said David Whelan, CEO of Immersive VR Education.
Whether inside the Coliseum or a hospital ER room, Engage allows educators to transport their classroom to wherever it is most relevant to the students.
“People learn best through experiences or doing tasks themselves. So if you are teaching, say, Aircraft maintenance and you are working on a Boeing engine. [In VR] You can bring in an engine, you can bring in parts, and have 4 or 5 students come in and collaborate in the virtual space. You [the educator] can say, ‘Alright guys you have 45 minutes to put this engine together and the students can lift parts that may weigh 4 or 5 tons, and manipulate them quite easily,” said Whelan.
For now, apps like this are primarily designed to shift how students and teachers interact in today’s learning spaces. In the future, educational work spaces such as Engage lecture halls will double as business boardrooms or co-working spaces for creative problem-solving.
Far too often, VR is mistaken to be a solitary, lonely experience — as a technology for play that enables escapists to further isolate themselves in a digitally created world. But this could not be further from the truth. Indeed, Facebook has invested so heavily into VR because their company’s vision is to connect the world.
“This is really a new communication platform,” said Zuckerberg after acquiring Oculus. “By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.”
The challenges facing educational VR in the U.S.
Much of the material VR companies are innovating for classes will not be purchased for personal use but by school districts, colleges and universities. The price for the hardware and software will not be cheap. For example, the Oculus Rift retails for $599.99 at Best Buy. Persuading these constituents to adopt VR/AR will be a challenge.
Marketing will be critical for getting constituents to adopt VR in schools and higher education. VR edtech companies will need to develop innovative marketing strategies that drive educational organizations to invest in VR. The impediments facing the adoption of VR edtech are similar to those VR faces in being adopted in other domains. Once parents see the upside of educational VR, they will become more comfortable with VR enhancing other forms of communication and its application in other work spaces.
VR educational companies will need to get creative not just when it comes to promoting VR to educators but also speaking with local and state politicians.
Convincing early adopters to buy into educational VR systems like zSpace and Immersive will be critical for its spread.
To give an example, one of zSpace’s biggest challenges is simply to get people to see it. Once young kids see it, they are enamored.
“I’ve seen a kid run out to the curb and yank his mom out of the car…and tell her ‘Mom, look at this! Look at what I did!’ It makes me want to tear up,” said Chavez.
“A lot people see VR as a gaming or entertainment peripheral, so the biggest challenge is getting educators who have been teaching lessons the same way for years and years to change their mindset,” said Whelan. “We have to convince them that it isn’t just a new way of providing the same old content, this a completely new way of teaching.”
Especially during this time when state legislatures are gutting educational budgets, VR educational companies will need to get creative not just when it comes to promoting VR to educators but also speaking with local and state politicians. This latter group must be persuaded that educational VR is worth the price. To persuade them, educational VR firms need to get in front of parents, students, teachers, administrators and political leaders. Educational VR innovators must convince them that the windfall warrants the upfront investment.
The next horizon in VR education
Where will educational VR head next? One possibility is that museums will begin to use 360-degree cameras and transform their collections and elaborate corridors into material that students all over the world can interact with by wearing an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Imagine a sixth-grade student in rural Arkansas putting on a VR headset in his social studies class. The teacher tells the class, “Today we are going to visit one of the greatest art collections in the world, the Louvre.” The app then transports the student to the gallery that houses Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
What would normally cost several thousand dollars and constitute a luxury trip that most American students could only dream of can become an immersive, interactive component of the students’ curriculum.
These virtual spaces will consist of customized avatars that can express features ranging from happy to confused. It won’t be long before a fourth-grade class in Newark, New Jersey will be able to go on a virtual school trip to the British Museum with a class of fourth graders from Kyoto, Japan. While the kids are on the virtual school trip, their parents can attend to their VR business meetings.
You may think this sounds like sci-fi, but 10 years from now this futuristic school trip to the Louvre may seem like the Atari of VR.
“I’m old enough to remember when computers came into schools first in the late 80s and early 90s. They sat there for years gathering dust because teachers didn’t want to touch them,” said Whelan. “But just like computers, VR will creep its way into education. In fact, I believe it will be adopted much sooner because people my age are teachers and accustomed to the rapid change of technology.”
Whelan also points out that VR set-ups are actually much cheaper than early PCs.
“When PCs first came out they were two or three thousand dollars, now you can get a really decent VR headset connected to a PlayStation for under 800 dollars, and the technology is just going to become cheaper.”
VR will be the next link in the sequence that has witnessed the human urge to connect and enhance communication stretching back several thousand years. It is a reimagination of what education can become and it will prepare students for a connected future of democratized virtual experiences and global communication and collaboration.
Azure Backup security capabilities for protecting cloud backups
By Pallavi Joshi as written on azure.microsoft.com
More and more customers are hit with security issues. These security issues result in data loss and the cost of security breach has been ever increasing. Despite having security measures in place, organizations face cyber threats because of vulnerabilities exposed by multiple IT systems. All these and many such data points pose very strong questions – Are your organization’s IT applications and data safe? What is the cost of recovering from the huge business impact in case of cyber attacks? If you have a backup strategy in place, are your cloud backups secure?
“Currently, there are over 120 separate ransomware families, and we’ve seen a 3500% increase in cybercriminal internet infrastructure for launching attacks since the beginning of the year” points out a recent CRN Quarterly Ransomware Report. To mitigate the threat of such attacks, FBI recommends users to regularly backup data and to secure backups in the cloud. This blog talks about Security Features in Azure Backup that help secure hybrid backups.
Value proposition
Malware attacks that happen today, target production servers to either re-encrypt the data or remove it permanently. Also, if production data is affected, the network share as well as backups are also affected, which can lead to data loss or data corruption. Hence, there is a strong need to protect production as well as backup data against sophisticated attacks and have a strong security strategy in place to ensure data recoverability.
Azure Backup now provides security capabilities to protect cloud backups. These security features ensure that customers are able to secure their backups and recover data using cloud backups if production and backup servers are compromised. These features are built on three principles – Prevention, Alerting and Recovery – to enable organizations increase preparedness against attacks and equip them with a robust backup solution.
Features
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Prevention: New authentication layer added for critical operations like Delete Backup Data, Change Passphrase. These operations now require Security PIN available only to users with valid Azure credentials.
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Alerting: Email notifications are sent for any critical operations that impact availability of backup data. These notifications enable users to detect attacks as soon as they occur.
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Recovery: Azure backup retains deleted backup data for 14 days ensuring recovery using any old or recent recovery points. Also, minimum number of recovery points are always maintained such that there are always sufficient number of points to recover from.
Getting started with security features
To start leveraging these features, navigate to recovery services vault in the Azure portal and enable them. The video below explains how to get started by enabling these features and how to leverage them in Azure Backup.
By Robbie Forkish as written on techcrunch.com
It seems like a fair trade: Get your favorite mobile apps for free, be shown annoying ads in return.
But that’s not all you’re doing in return. In reality, this trade has you giving up a great deal of personal information. Mobile apps collect a massive amount of personal data — your location, your online history, your contacts, your schedule, your identity and more. And all that data is instantly shared with mobile advertising networks, which use it to determine the best ad for any given user at any given time and place.
So, the trade-off isn’t really ads for apps — it’s intrusive mobile surveillance for apps. By agreeing to free, ad-sponsored mobile apps, we’ve consented to an economic model that entails continuous and comprehensive personal surveillance. It’s what Al Gore accurately characterized as the stalker economy.
Why is our personal, locational and behavioral data so coveted by marketers? Because a smartphone is something that we as consumers carry everywhere we go, and it’s constantly broadcasting personal data of all kinds. If advertisers know who we are, where we are and what we’re doing, they can deliver more effective ads. It’s called proximity marketing. It’s the Rite Aid ad that pings your phone as you walk through the aisles: “Save 10% now on mouthwash.”
Sounds innocuous, if annoying. But it goes much further than this. We’ve now enabled a system where a major retailer can know, for example, that a teenager is pregnant before her parents do simply by correlating her activity, search and purchase data. That retailer can then reach out via mail or email, or target her via phone when she is near a point of sale. This intrusion on our collective privacy isn’t going away anytime soon (if ever), as the economic incentives for app developers and advertisers are too strong.
A compromised smartphone represents a threat not just to the targeted employee but to the entire company.
OK, agreed, this kind of consumer surveillance is intrusive and creepy. But how does it threaten enterprise security? Simple. As more personal mobile devices invade the business world, leaks from those devices are opening the door to corporate hacks, stolen business data and crippling cyberattacks.
For instance, if a company lets its employees sync their corporate calendars and email accounts to their personal mobile devices, this opens up all sorts of risks. Suddenly, employees’ phones contain or can access the contact information of everyone in the organization. Further, any other mobile app that requests access to the employees’ contacts and calendar also gets access to the names and titles of company employees, as well as the dial-in codes for all private conference calls. This information can easily be put to effective use in a spear-phishing attack by a malicious app or hacker.
Worse, many apps monetize their user bases by sharing data with ad networks that share and combine data with other networks, so it’s impossible to know where exactly data is going and whether it’s being handled in a secure fashion by any of the many parties that have access to it. All of this sharing means a malicious hacker doesn’t even have to directly access an employee’s phone to attack a company. He can hack an ad network that has information from millions of users and go from there.
Stolen information can also be used to attack an enterprise through a watering-hole attack. Say a small group of executives have lunch regularly at a local restaurant. An attacker with access to their geolocation data could easily know this. The attacker correctly assumes that some of the execs are accessing the restaurant’s website to make reservations and browse the menu before lunch. By placing malware on the lightly defended site, the attacker is able to compromise the office computer or mobile device of one or more company executives. From there, a successful breach is launched.
A compromised smartphone represents a threat not just to the targeted employee but to the entire company. Information about employees’ activities, both on the job and elsewhere, combined with any company-related emails, documents or sensitive information, can be devastating to an organization if it gets into the wrong hands.
So what should enterprises do to combat the threat?
The first step is to get visibility into your mobile environment. Your organization needs to know which apps employees are using, what those apps are doing and whether or not they comply with corporate security policies. For example, is there a particularly risky file-sharing app you don’t want employees to use? Is it already being used? If you don’t know the apps employees are using for work, you are flying blind and taking a huge risk.
It is imperative that your enterprise include mobile threat protection as part of its overall security strategy.
Second, you’ll need a policy for managing the use of mobile devices. Most organizations already have policies for other platforms, including managing firewalls and sharing data with partners. It’s equally important to create these policies for mobile. For instance, if employees are using free versions of apps that are approved by the company but ad-supported, create a policy that requires employees to upgrade to the paid version to minimize, if not eliminate, unsanctioned data in the form of ads being sent to employees — though it doesn’t eliminate the relentless collection of personal and private data.
Next, your organization should educate employees about the risks of the apps they download. It’s in your best interest to empower users by arming them with tools and training to make better decisions about which apps they download. For instance, coach your employees to question apps that ask for permission. There are lots of apps that want to access location, contacts or camera. Employees don’t have to say yes automatically. Most apps will work fine if the request is denied, and prompt users if a permission is actually needed. If an app does not say why it needs access, that’s a big red flag.
Finally, all of these areas can be addressed with a good mobile security solution. Any enterprise without a mobile threat protection solution is by definition unaware of what information is leaking and from where, and unable to address the risks that exist in its environment. It is therefore imperative that your enterprise include mobile threat protection as part of its overall security strategy in order to protect employee privacy and company data from the ever-growing threat of mobile surveillance and data gathering.
