When we set up CareKnowledge back in 2002, we were very pleased to establish a relationship with Pavilion Publishing, and license some of their content. Having spent many years running the National Institute for Social Work Library, their journals always stood out to me as providing articles with a real focus on management and practice issues, rather than being too academic in focus. And we also chose several of their books to go onto CareKnowledge – two excellent books on supervision, and Terry Scragg’s ‘Management at the Front Line’ textbook. They were successful with our readers, to the exent that one authority was about to advise all their managers to print off the textbook. I suggested that rather than using reams of printer paper, and boxes of toner cartridge, getting Pavilion to do them a special price on bulk copies would be more appropriate. They took up that suggestion.

In fact, we liked the Pavilion content moment we had a Victor Kiam moment (from his 1970s TV adverts : “I liked Remington Razors so much – I bought the company!”) Now we are an integrated unit, we are looking at innovative ways of bringing their content to the social care workforce. One of the first stages of this is to pilot an electronic version of Terry’s ‘Managing at the Front Line’, rather than simply providing a PDF of the textbook on CareKnowledge.

Which is why I was in Brighton this sunny morning, with Terry, and colleagues Jan and Kerry. We’re experimenting with software previously called Breeze (hence the title of this post), now Adobe Presenter, which enables a more interactive presentation of material.

And part of the Breeze presentation includes getting Terry on film to do a video voiceover for the text. We’re using the same Flip mini-camcorders we’re using for the Engagement projects we’re running, but I got Kerry to take some footage of Terry and I using my Kodak zi8 camcorder (other mini-camcorders are available!).

At the end of a couple of hours, we got Terry to re-do the opening sequence, and as you’ll see below, whilst not quite being a Dennis Norden moment, it did require a second take! We’ll have the electronic version of the opening part of the textbook – ‘On Becoming A Manager’ – online in a couple of weeks, and we’ll be very keen to get your feedback.