PEARL 2020 Digital Conference Thursday 25th June 2020 ‘Ethical issues on self-funding social care: co-producing knowledge with older people’

The Team at HARG presented virtually at the University of Lincoln ‘Public Engagement for All with Research at Lincoln’ – PEARL 2020 Conference on Thursday 25th June 2020. The virtual presentation was on recent work regarding ‘Ethical issues on self-funding social care: co-producing knowledge with older people’.

Link to the presentation can be found here:

Summary kindly provided by Mike Astill (Lay Researcher)

The research team had been holding video online meetings since the CoVid19 Lockdown in March 2020.

The University of Lincoln had decided to go ahead with a video Pearl Conference (on 25 June 2020) and at our meeting on 4th June we discussed the possibility of participation.

We have always worked closely together as a team and felt that it would be appropriate for several of us to be involved in the presentation of the project.  We believed that it would be problematic doing a “live” multi-person presentation at a video conference due to our unfamiliarity with the technology and the inherent unreliability of some of our Internet connections.  I boldly suggested that we could prepare a video recorded presentation from individually recorded clips and that I, based on my limited and somewhat rusty experience of making holiday videos, would stitch the individual clips together into a coherent whole.

The co-researchers who wished to be involved produced test video clips on their iPhones, android phones and other assorted technologies and sent them to me to see if I could stitch them together.  This exercise was successful, but included having to convert the format of some of the videos and having to dub a voice track over a silent clip of the tree.

At an online meeting on 10th June we decided the topics to be covered and agreed a general outline of the video and members of the group were tasked with producing their scripts and recording themselves presenting the scripts.  Another member was tasked with taking a video and stills of the tree and a further member was asked to make a voice over for the tree segment. These were then sent to me by various diverse file transfer processes. Our initial thought was that the videos would be sent to me as email attachments, but the size limitation which most email systems place on attachments meant that we had to resort to file transfer systems such as Dropbox and BT Cloud.

For technical reasons one member of the group was unable to provide a video clip, it was therefore decided that his presentation would be audio overlaid on a still photo, which I had to doctor to hide the fact that his office appeared to be in a corner of his garage.

Fortunately the team were very efficient and provided their video in a timely manner which allowed me to edit and complete the video in good time for the conference.

The main problem that I had was deciding when the editing of the video was completed. Those who write articles or reports know how difficult it is to draw the line and decide when the item is “good enough”!

For the technically inclined the video was produced on a Windows 10 computer with an Intel core i3 processor and 8gb of memory. The editing software was Serif MoviePlus X6 (c 2013)