Petites? What?

This morning our motley crew gathered at 9:00 to talk about how this whole thing was going to play out this week. Our organizer, Don Knezek (CEO of ISTE), has had a little bit of frustration trying to get things locked down but we are all ready to just roll with it. We start at 2:00 tomorrow with a a panel - I'm on it. Online (fully) ed is not high on their list here. More buildings, face to face, etc. But I had a good conversation today with a woman about building an online course regarding doing business in Dubai. We have been trying to get something like that going for China but I keep facing language barriers (read...they don't respond to my email messages) even tho we received a positive reception to the idea when Rob and I were there. At any rate, we'll see what happens. It's early in the week so I plan to make a lot more contacts before I leave on Friday.

The group also toured the convention center where we will be tomorrow. I will be in one of the rooms we have (we have two, one for K-12 and one for higher ed). Huge rooms and they are connected to the expo show for two other sort of related conferences. We are basically a subset of a larger conference on technology (GETEX). And there is a conference for recruiting college students as well so I plan to dump a lot of my UTTC cards there....Supposedly there are only about 95 people signed up for our forum but I'm looking forward to winging it....fits me perfectly. I love to base my comments on the audience without PowerPoint dependence!!

So, because I don't have any other clothes yet, I went to the Medina Mall, about 15 minutes from the hotel to see if I could find something to wear to the meeting this afternoon. You know, there are a LOT of short people around here, but the stores are quite limited on petites. I had an hour, and anyone who knows me knows that if my size is there I can do a lot of damage in that amount of time. Suffice it to say that I left with some Clinique makeup so that at least I could be presentable and NO clothes. I felt like I shouldn't attend the meeting but everyone (including our hosts) said that I must...so I did. And just like in China, I was the only person in blue jeans but I was probably the most comfortable too!