>There are very few topics I can sit for 75 minutes and have someone lecture me with PPT slides and actually learn anything.

Is the intent to learn something, or to know what the technology can do and what the possibilities are while you can research the details when you get home? My perspective is obviously different, in that I look at sessions as an opportunity to see what hot new stuff is available and what it can do. If I need implementation details, I'll look it up when I get home.

> To me, the current DevCon session formats are really only suitable for
>previews and overviews.

It's a format that suited me just fine back when I was working outside of the Death Star.

>I'd like to see sessions where attendence was limited to 20 people. Everyone brings a laptop and the presenter leads everyone through the topic hands on with the last 20 minutes or so instructor-led experimentation with the topic.

My only problem with such a format would be that Mary Hotshot has to sit there twiddling her thumbs while Joe Numbskull repeatedly asks time-consuming questions because he just doesn't "get it". To avoid a situation where the inmates run the asylum, it would take a presenter who is more skilled in teaching a class rather than being used to speaking uninterrupted.

However, despite my perspective or objections, I think there is a place for such sessions. How many of us take the laptop back to the room, or get home to the desktop, only to find that we can't make it work like the expert did in the PowerPoint slides? A "hands-on" session could very well be worthwhile, I suppose.

Off-topic PowerPoint-related sidenote: typing this reminded me of a comment from a coworker: "we ought to make PowerPoint our main OS, since all of our apps seem to run better on PowerPoint than any of our real OSs." :-)