I'm back from a couple of days at The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) conference in Baltimore, MD. Before I get into my recap of the conference, things that (with apologies to Peter King) may be interesting only to me:

• Rooms where people used to smoke that have been sprayed with "freshener" are not non-smoking...I happened to be stuck in one.
• The hotel where I stayed was, well, tired comes to mind, but the fitness center was about the nicest I have seen in any hotel.
• On Friday night Peter Baron and I stepped off of the elevator and saw a guy in shiny black pants and a gold sequined dinner jacket. He turned around and it was none other than Elvis! Turns out that we were in the Baltimore Inner Harbor on the 15th Night of 100 Elvises. Apparently the event was sold out. Who knew?

Just thought I'd share...

So for the conference. This was my first time going to TABS without having a table in the exhibit hall. It was a different experience being "untethered." It gave me a chance to walk around and get more of a feel for being a participant. It become even clearer to me that the TABS conference has become much more about residential life than any other facet of boarding school life. That makes sense in a lot of ways (res life is what makes boarding schools different from any other kind), but it is a shift from the early days of the organization when admissions got the most attention.

For someone there without a professional development agenda, TABS is really about having conversations and getting some face time with people that you otherwise usually only communicate with from a distance. I saw a number of old friends and people that I have worked with over the years. I had the opportunity to talk with some folks about our FileMaker and Drupal software for schools and got several invites to continue the conversation. Looking forward to that.

It was good to bump into one of my teachers from St. Paul's who is now head of the Upper School at St. Stephen's Episcopal in TX. Had some enjoyable conversations with John and Rob from FinalSite and caught up with the team from WhippleHill. I especially enjoyed spending time with Sara Lynn Renda - formerly director of admission at Westover, now Director of Strategy and Client Services at Imagepath.

No question that the biggest topic on my mind, and the best conversation starter, was the role of social media in schools. Best conversation to that end was with Antonio Viva from Worcester Academy who I was really happy to meet in person after getting to know him through our Twitter exchanges. We both had the opportunity to sit down to talk about social media in boarding schools. edSocMe has the recording of the Ustream broadcast we did.

In all, it was a nice way to begin closing out 2008 and it got me that much more excited about our serious re-entry into the independent school world in 2009.