I gave three different, but related, presentations at the Building Learning Communities conference. (Next post will be all about them.) I had planned to give presentations in rooms without walls; my personal riff on Playing With Boundaries. It didn't happen.

We were going to have TwitterCamp installed and displayed on a Promethean board while I showed the main presentation using a projector. The idea was to have everyone in the room join my twitter network and tweet what I was talking about interlacing their questions, concerns, compliments, complaints, confusions, uncertainties, anxieties and doubts to each other. We would have a place where I could see the tweets (making thoughts transparent) and also have others on my twitter network tweeting with their ideas and reactions as well. I was aiming for a conference without boundaries; or at least a conference with glass walls.

Lester Ray and Cyndy Everest from Apple were heroic in trying to make this work. Joyce also came to the rescue. She installed Adobe AIR and TwitterCamp on her laptop which we plugged into the Promethean Board and used another laptop where she was logged in to my email account. She accepted twitter invites from everyone in the room so that their tweets would display through my account. (Next time I do this I'll set up a unique twitter account for the conference and have people befriend the conference.)

Although everything was installed properly (at least I'm fairly confident it was) the tweets never displayed. All I got to show people was the naked skin I had created (thanks to a couple of helpful tweets from Alan Levine) without the little puffs of transparent thinking I was hoping for. Fortunately Barbara Bareda, Joyce Valenza (both in the room) and Jeff Utecht (in Seattle) chatcasted it. (I think Jeff has already published that but I will too in my next post.)

I was really proud of the skin I made. I customized it with images from my blog and one for the conference. Here's a screen shot ...