Today was my presentation at the University Sains Malaysia.

I was picked up this morning by Abdul Hamid, a huge beefy man, with little English, but a great smile. A beautiful half-hour drive along a sea-side highway led us the University which is perched somewhat on a hill with a great view of the ocean. (No pictures, sorry.)

My presentation started at 9:30 and there was a very good crowd (over 50 faculty members and graduate students from across the university). I am glad that I had talked to Rozinah on Saturday about who would be in the audience. For some reason I had been expecting a teacher education crowd, but she informed me that it would be more of a higher education group, so I used my time yesterday combining the talk Matt Koehler and I had given at the Colloquium on the Changing Professoriate back in March with the talk Matt and I had prepared for the GCCCC conference. Moreover, the talk was to be in two parts, from 9:30 – 11 and then from 11:30 – 12. So I had had to break my talk into two parts – a longer first part that introduced the TPACK framework and a shorter second half that spoke directly to issues related to higher education and still left time for questions. I was a little worried about the timing of the thing since I had no opportunity to practice the talk and I tend to blabber on forever, if given a chance.

All said and done, the presentation went off well. The timing ended up being perfect and we had a good question and answer session at the end along with some interesting one-on-one conversations with individual faculty members and students during the break and after the session. It was really a lot of fun.

I got back to the hotel (after a nice lunch and some great conversation) only to realize that I was missing the power cord for my laptop. A brief moment of panic prompted by the realization that I was just at the beginning of my trip, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a MacBook Pro power cord, particularly given how briefly I was staying at various cities. A couple of phone calls later I was glad to learn that I had left it at the meeting room and that the ever dependable Abdul Hamid would be bringing it back to the hotel.

The evening was spent shopping for trinkets. For dinner, I realized that I was really missing American food! So I ended up going to Chilli’s and having a nice grilled chicken salad! Can you believe that?