Personal Blogs

Alerted to the nature of being 'open' and online you'd think someone who has been doing this kind of thing since 1999 would know better.

Taking part in a Google Hangout on Monday with educators in Australia and being away from home I decided to give it a go on the iPad. The awkward thing here is that you can't open a second screen ... and as I eventually discovered you can inadvertently flip the camera.

I decided to sit in one corner of the guest bedroom with the back of the chair and corner of the room as a back drop - what I didn't realise is that somehow, when swiping away from the Google Hangout screen I had flipped the camera so that everyone was now seeing the bed I'd climbed out of earlier that morning. At least it was 10.30am in the UK and 9.30pm in Melbourne - I had made the bed.

Towards the end of the session the assumption was that I'd left - actually I was holding the iPad very carefully as I didn't know, having lost the image, if they were seeing me, the top of my head or my lap, They could hear me perfectly well and they said they had wondered about the bed which rather explained the smirks on some of their faces ... 

I took the iPad to the bedroom window - not to throw it into the garden, but at least to give them something more than a view of the bed - pink blossom on an overgrown shrub looking into a wet garden in the Cotswolds. I find it striking that when a tractor went up the lane the moderator in Australia had to mute the sound - so instant. We can be and are so very much closer than we think courtesy of the Web, that you can be transported into a space so close to another person that it feels you are invading their privacy.

More care next time? Not bother? 

There are plenty of people who will have little to do with the Internet and plenty of others who reveal as little as possible. I'm just glad I hadn't taken the iPad into the bathroom - it does happen.

It was a discussion on creativity in education - one worth doing. I'm yet to look at the recording.

Back at my desk NO WEBCAM even attached, just as well, I'm eating breakfast, in pyjama's having crawled out of bed far, far, far too early in a drive to close down a 5,000 words EMA for H818: The Networked Practitioner.