Huge thanks to Philip, Elizabeth, Gaynor, Tati, Arvin, Drew and Lizzie!

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.

Probably most inspiring of all was Sir Ken Robinson’s Keynote on Wednesday – standing room only in the ICC’s Symphony Hall!  His enthusiasm for education reminds us why we all got involved with it in the first place.

The subject was a familiar one – Creativity – and explored many of the themes from the RSA lecture “Changing Paradigms“. 

He spent a lot of time talking about ‘transforming education’, arguing that the current system – based on a linear subject-based curriculum with standardised testing – must be redesigned.  Primarily, because it discourages creativity and the ability of people to fully achieve their potential.

He also defined Creativity as “the process of having original ideas which have value”. Which got me thinking about how we can use technology to try to support creativity – and also about what the future for technology in education should aspire to be.

Since the internet has had the largest single impact on how we use technology to access our media, it seems sensible to assume that a future for technology in education is likely to be online, web-based for the learner.

If we look at patterns of use of media, web technologies provide us not just with unprecedented access to information – but also to unprecedented access to small bite-size chunks of media (YouTube, Wikipedia, ..) in a disaggregated form. 

These small chunks of content are provided to us in a context which encourages re-use and collaboration – with web applications that empower us to pull content from many sources, to manipulate it and self-publish.  And to do so with each other online and in real-time (Facebook, Flickr, blogs ..).

Fundamentally, the way we use the web is one of the most democratic methods of communication – it provides us with a means of expression and the ability to reach an audience.

It enables us to be creative and to share ideas – just one element of what we need to support the redesign a future education system!

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.

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.

It doesn’t sound all that radical in today’s age of social networking, but bearing in mind it was written in 1970 it’s remarkably prescient.

Almost 40 years on, Becta has commissioned a project called Young People and Social Networking Services to

to investigate how social networking services can and are being used to support personalised formal and informal learning by young people in schools and colleges.

Not surprisingly, the project finds that social networks provide lots of benefits and opportunities for formal and informal learning. These include debating, discussion, content creation, exploring and of course, collaboration and peer learning.

So, why aren’t they more widely adpoted? Well, interestingly the report also looks at some of the barriers to adoption and finds that the education system itself is just not geared to the provision of such services – from the lack of training to support teachers in the use of these technologies through to the blocking and filtering procedures in school ICT infrastructure.

Of course, Illich’s primary thesis with Deschooling Society was that a universal education system based on schools was not feasible and ran contrary to his central arguments for disestablishing schools. On the face of it, the findings of this new project indicates that not much has changed in 40 years and that the very ’system’ of schools is still preventing the use of “Learning Webs”.

But the fact that Becta is supporting this project indicates otherwise and that things are changing. Social networking is a reality in the lives of many of us (not just ‘young people’!). Understanding the risks (and there is an excellent section on this also provided by the project) is a key element but today’s students are savvy web users.

Ivan Illich was right: learning webs (=social networks) are a tremendously rewarding and beneficial educational experience. However, they can co-exist alongside ‘traditional schools’. He just didn’t anticipate how pervasive and powerful these technolgies would become.

Pro is a dedicated, managed service and offers schools a number of additional benefits:

• Learning Platform integration – ready to work with a school’s existing infrastructure
• SCORM compatible – resources can be exported as SCORM objects
• Curriculum linked resources – built and shared by teachers and education professionals
• Teachers Notes – add notes to resources to aid lesson planning
• Personal web space – all users have their own web space to store media and resources

So welcome to all our new users in Nottinghamshire, its fantastic to have you with us. If your school or authority would like to know more about how Pro can benefit you, please contact us.

The Magic Studio Pro network has been developed as a means of delivering digital assets from the cultural heritage world into school classrooms. It works like Flickr’s ‘The Commons’ project – except that your content is provided alongside a set of tools designed for the education sector and integrated with school learning platforms (oh, and we’re a bit smaller than Yahoo!).

Users in schools access the content from their existing infrastructure and can combine assets from different collections, or with their own user-generated content, to build, tag and share interactive learning resources.

The mechanics of making your collections available are fairly simple – you can:

• pull content directly from your Flickr or Picasa accounts (we have integrated with their open API’s)

• set up a dynamic content feed from your own collection (using standard feed types)

• provide us with a ‘dump’ of your database and metadata and we will do a bulk upload

Once it’s in there, you will get access to a number of services to control how your content is presented and detailed usage reports on who is using your content and what they are doing with it (the usage reports are provided via Google Docs integration).

We’re also in the process of developing an API over the next month or so which will allow you to manage your Magic Studio resources as well as use them in your own mash-ups (an ATOM feed is already available). And we are working on integrations with a number of other social networks, including a Magic Studio Facebook application.

To get a good idea of the functionality on offer to users, please take a look at the new public beta of Magic Studio at http://www.magicstudio.com. This consumer version is similar to the school Pro network, minus the classroom integration.

If you are interested in taking advantage of this service, please contact us.

It is free of charge and we don’t charge schools for your content. It is also non-exclusive and you can choose to remove your content at any time.

Anyway, SILVER stands for Semantic Interactive Learning Visualisation Environment Research. At least it does what it says on the tin! It’s a Technology Strategy Board (TSB)-funded research project that we are involved in with our partners the Bridgeman Art Library (BAL) and the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University (KMI).

What will it do? In a nutshell, we are exploring the next generation of web-based knowledge visualisation for education.

Why? We know from our understanding of pedagogy that the ability to visualise knowledge can have a huge impact on the process of learning (that’s why KMI are in there with us). We also know there’s lots of great content out there with an inherent educational value that often remains untapped (hence, BAL’s involvement).

And we also know that new web-based technologies are enabling us to interact (create, share, collaborate) in real-time through a web-browser in ways that were previously confined to PC-based applications (which is where we come in!).

Put those 3 elements together and you have a powerful mix of best-practice skills and experience which, over the next 3 years will deliver great results. We have high hopes – it may be early days but already the signs are extremely encouraging.

If you want to stay in touch with how it’s progressing, the SILVER website is the place to be. And no doubt there’ll be plenty more posts here.

Oh, and Tonto’s horse was called Scout!