Magic Studio

There’s a buzz at the moment about API’s and the growing demand for openness to satisfy the demand for the creative re-use of digital assets.

Of course, we are big fans of open API’s. They are incredibly useful because they allow systems to interface with each other, and when used over the web they have he potential to ‘set data free’. Check out Seb Chan’s blog posting at the Powerhouse Museum to see just how creative this can be.

At Magic Studio, API’s are the key to unlocking the flow of content over the Network. So, having them is widely considered to be “a good thing”, but what’s also important is that they are “open” and “well-documented”.

Anyway, we thought it would be good to share where we have got to with API’s and Magic Studio as we already have some existing API’s and integrations, plus a set of new things waiting in the wings.

First up, this is what we have:

1. PLATFORM API.  Magic Studio provides a platform API for integration with VLEs / Learning Platforms. We use this to get Magic in place within large populations of schools for use by teachers and pupils. Once in place our content partners (Private and Public sector) can provide their content as interactive resources to those users.
2. CONTENT API’s.  These work in a number of ways:

• the Magic Studio Gateway API supports ingestion of content from XML feed (RSS, Atom) sources. The Gateway API will also shortly offer a simple web service interface to uploading asset files and metadata in to Magic Studio. This allows for authenticated and unauthenticated requests for data about resources. The API is very similar to the Google API’s and therefore uses Atom feeds to present metadata about resources and OAuth to authenticate requests;
• we have “Content Discovery” via an OpenSearch API; and,
• we also provide an optional SCORM export for bringing Magic Studio interactives into learning platforms

But we’re not going to stop there. In progress are OpenID/Shibboleth sign-on and Developer API’s for extending Magic Studio with new interactive types.

We have also hooked into a number of online services so that Magic users can have a single, joined up view of their digital resources and can share into these services from Magic. These include Flickr; Picasa; YouTube; Facebook (Beta).

And specific integration code sets are in constant evolution catering for various learning/education platforms: Frog, Uniservity, SuperClubs, Fronter and Moodle.

That covers it, I think. For now.