The content comes via a live SOAP feed from the Heritage Explorer website, meaning that Magic Studio users also benefit from the contextual and metadata information authored by the English Heritage education team in Swindon.

The new content comes from counties all over England, with images from Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Derbyshire, North Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Somerset and Shropshire.

All of the material is licenced for use free of charge with the Magic Studio network, with links to related resources from other content providers and users.

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.

The content comes via a live feed from the Heritage Explorer website, meaning that Magic Studio users also benefit from the contextual and metadata information authored by the English Heritage education team in Swindon.

The collection consists of a rich and varied set of imagery – from aerial photography, through to iconic buildings and war records.  All of the material is licenced for use free of charge with the Magic Studio network, with links to related resources from other content providers and users.

England’s Past for Everyone (EPE) is a Heritage Lottery-funded local history project run by the Victoria County History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. EPE is working with academics and local communities to produce a series of paperback books, an interactive website and learning resources for schools.

EPE has projects running in Bristol, Cornwall, Derbyshire, County Durham, Exmoor, Herefordshire, Kent, Oxfordshire, Sussex and Wiltshire.

At Magic Studio, we’re excited that such a rich source of documents, images, text and audio will be made available to our users and look forward to seeing how teachers and home users create new, exciting resources with them.

We’ll keep you updated on progress and when the content will be available.

On Day 2, we are doing a joint presentation entitled “From the Collection to the Classroom”, where we’ll be demonstrating how to use Gateway to set up a content feed from collection databases and deliver it as a channel to hundreds of schools using the Magic Studio Network.  Mary and Cat will then be showing how they use the Magic Studio tools to build curriculum-linked learning interactives for use in class.

If you’re up at the show, come and see us on Stand 25 …

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 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.

What was most interesting for us was the exploration of themes at the event, entitled “Integrate, Federate, Aggregate … making collections connect online”.

And probably the most pervasive of all was the issue of ‘access’ and ‘creative re-use’ of digitised collections. Whilst digitisation strategies have long been focused on the preservation benefits of collections in digital form, there is real momentum building behind the improved ‘access’ opportunities that these digitised collections present.

These issues were explored in a number of sessions throughout the day. Jeremy Ottevanger talked about his experience of the European Digital Library which is an EU initiative to bring collections together. He did, however, express that the most important aspect of such a project – an API that would really open up access to the collections – didn’t seem to be an important priority for the project.

And that rather parochial approach – allowing access but not re-use – still needs to be addressed on a more widespread basis.

We saw that Flickr is extending its ‘The Commons’ which in itself presents an interesting new model for public/private partnerships in the sector – though restricted to photographic collections only.

More heartening was the ‘Quick and Light’ section and the results of the previous day’s ‘Mashed Museum’ activity. Lots of examples of how to syndicate, share and mash collections together in interesting ways … using the hoard.it prototype of 45000+ museum objects available via a unified API.

In a Web2.0 world, we understand better than ever the art of the possible when it comes to opening up access and encouraging creative re-use of collections. So, there should be no barriers, should there?

However, ask your average user to explain what metadata is and you may well get a much shorter answer, if you get an answer at all. Does this matter? Well, not if the metadata does what it is supposed to do – and surely one of its most important roles is to improve the user experience.

It doesn’t always work like that, though. Take the example of a learner or teacher working in a school environment. To be able to fully exploit the ICT infrastructure of the school (Mobile devices, PC’s, Interactive Whiteboards, Learning Platform, etc) the user is seeking ease of use, accessibility and interoperability. Everything they use or create should be accessible and usable wherever their point of access is. Sounds like it should be easy enough. After all, we are operating in a web-enabled world where media is ‘portable’ and footloose.

But, when it comes to Digital Learning Resources (or DLR’s) things are not so simple. Why? Partly it’s because of the lack of a simple and open standard for exchanging resources. Sure, we have SCORM – but the latest version (2004, 3rd edition since you ask) is actually a collection of specifications and standards. These incorporate metadata about the DLR. Whether or not SCORM is an appropriate set of standards for DLR’s is not the point – that’s an argument for another day. Whether SCORM is actually acting as a help or hindrance to the creation and sharing of DLR’s is much more important.

In particular, this raises a serious issue about the user (learner or teacher) as author. If you are trying to produce a DLR, should you have to worry about making it ‘standards-compliant’? User-generated content works because anyone can do it. If the ‘standards’ are acting as a barrier to creation and collaboration, are they being counter-productive?

It’s not just the fact that this pilot project is bringing 3000 of the 14 million photographic images to a new public LoC Flickr page.

The licencing approach is novel and fresh. They’re using out-of-copyright images that can be used by anyone with no restrictions, and have introduced a new ‘No known copyright restrictions’ system for these images. They’re calling it ‘The Commons’. Or, as they say:

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

This is music to our ears – and exactly the principle around which we’re basing our Magic Studio Gateway service for museums, libraries and archives.

The LoC and Flickr are asking the public to tag and comment on the images, with the intention of feeding that back into their catalogue to improve their metadata.

We’d also like to see that philosophy flipped around – what if that social tagging can also be used to drive greater educational value for the collections – and get them straight into the classroom?

Next step for us is to look how we can extend our existing work with the Flickr content API to also incorporate LoC results into our Magic Studio federated search – dynamically pulling these amazing collections into toolkits to build interactive educational resources.

Wouldn’t that be something?