• new home page design
• new object view page
• navigation moved to the top of the page (from the right)
• a new ‘Full Screen’ button is incorporated in the top right corner of all interactives

We hope you enjoy the new changes!

If you can provide us with a web feed (Atom, OAI, RSS) or already have
your content in YouTube, Flickr or Picasa, we can pull it (and the
metadata) directly into the Magic Studio Network free of charge.  We
are happy to take small or large feeds, as long as the content is
relevant to the curriculum (primary or secondary).  Content is then
made available to teachers and students within the network, free for
educational use only.

In return, we provide you with a web-based interface that allows you to:

• manage your feed(s) and generate branded channels of content
• set specific licensing terms
• build your own interactive learning resources
• collaborate with teachers online
• interrogate and generate detailed user statistics from the network
• automatically watermark your images
• add more education-specific metadata and curriculum tags

If you are interested in taking part, please contact us.

Administration of Shibboleth for the education sector is provided by the UK Access Management Federation, supported by JISC and Becta and operated by JANET(UK).

Magic Studio is a registered service provider with UKAMF and you can view our credentials here.  If you are interested in using Magic Studio in conjunction with Shibboleth authentication, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

• Magic Studio is now fully shibboleth enabled for learning platform or content authentication needs
• A new two-column layout for library and dashboard has been created giving more room to see the content and its supporting information
• If  Scorm is enabled for your Learning Platform, your LP users have the option to download Magic content as a regular zip file or as a Scorm object
• An option for audio messages to be played back in drag and drop activities has been added. This allows authors to use their own recorded audio feedback messages as positive and negative responses to drag and drop interaction.
• We have added an option for the autoplay of audio and video in hotspots in all interactives. This will make for a more immediate and engaging experience and removes the need for users to click anything when a hotspot is opened.
• Numerous usability and browser issues have also been addressed to make Magic Studio even more intuitive to use.

Five years ago, in the Summer of 2003, the Department for Education and Skills published a document entitled ‘The Value Chain for Digital Learning Content in England’.

The purpose of the document was

to provide a commonly understood model and language for the Digital Learning Content market in England. It represents the value that is added to digital learning content through the key stages from conception to use. It also depicts the key roles undertaken by organisations involved in these stages (p.3).

The document focuses on a linear model of economic value throughout the chain.

So, why are we revisiting it now?  Well, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.  The report was commissioned as part of the Curriculum Online Programme – COL has since come and gone, and is widely regarded in some quarters as not having fulfilled its potential as a ‘content marketplace’. 

But more significant are the rapid changes in technology that have and are impacting on the so-called economic value chain for digital content. 

It’s worth revisiting some key elements of the original document; it provided a summary of the top level Value Chain, where digital learning content flows through stages, with actors at each stage (in bold) adding more value and creating a new ‘output’.  In brief:

1. Education Needs Market Analysts take policy objectives, educational aims and performance data (as Curriculum Information) and Management Information and Usage Feedback from the use of digital learning content from learners, teachers and parents. They identify gaps between policy objectives and actual performance. These are then fed into the Commissioner as Unmet Needs.

2. The Commissioner takes this input and provides a Commissioned Brief that addresses the Unmet Needs to the Producer.

3. The Producer takes a Commissioned Brief and, through a combination of Existing Content acquired from Rights Owner(s) and newly created content and various production processes, delivers Produced Content to the publisher.

4. The Publisher takes the Produced Content and publishes it through a combination of the use of their brand (in the role of Imprint Owner) and by cataloguing it as a product for sale (in the role of Product Cataloguer) as Published Content.

5. In the broadest sense, the role of a Retailer in the market is to take Published Content and ‘take it to market’ and thereby enable it to be Acquired Content by customers. Whether purchased or unpaid for, it is released in some way, possibly without restriction or alternatively subject to registration or other licence conditions.

6. Once customers have Acquired Content, the role of the Fulfilment Agent is to get the product physically to the end user as Delivered Content.

7. Physically Delivered Content can then be used by an Educator to transfer knowledge, skills and understanding to learners.

As a linear economic value chain, this model appears to stand the test of time and a lot of valuable digital learning content is being produced and delivered within this framework. 

However, what has changed in the meantime is the emergence of enabling technologies that effectively support every stage in the value chain in one place. 

More specifically, the evolution of Web2.0 style services and Web Applications means that we have a scenario where this entire value chain is conflated and compressed so that a single individual can fulfil each stage and role within a matter of minutes.  And this can all be done from within the end users’ own ‘delivery environment’ i.e. through the web browser.

As an example, a teacher is working with a browser-based learning platform that is pre-loaded with the necessary curriculum information.  Using a re-use tool (e.g. Magic Studio Pro!), the teacher can select raw assets (freely available and copyright-cleared) that they want to use to prepare or create digital learning content.  Whilst they are building the resource on the interactive whiteboard in the classroom it is also delivered simultaneously to learners, providing an immediate feedback loop.  When they are happy to do so, the teacher chooses to ’share’ these same resources with other teachers for them to re-use.  All from within the same browser pages.

So, they assess the learning requirement, commission and produce the resource, provide it to learners and take their feedback, publish and deliver it to the market.  In the space of a few minutes.

As an alternative model, this offers the potential for empowerment, flexibility, sustainability and all very cost-effective and time-efficient.

The value chain for digital learning content in today’s Web2.0 world is more relevant than ever … it’s just that now we can all participate to a much greater extent than previously in each stage and role – and we can conflate it all down into a process of a few minutes.   Doing so therefore gives the end user much greater control and influence.  The value chain becomes a value-for-money chain.

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.