“What is it about a session that you need to know to make a decision about whether to go to it?”
For me, you’ve particularly got it when you asked:
“Level of experience aimed at?” – though i know that it’s
a: Really hard for presenters to categorise the level they’re aiming at (i.e. what level do you have to be to be “expert”; if you’ve used tool X extensively, but tool y never – does that experience mean you’re actually really quite familiar with tool y?)
b: Can’t police who turns up anyway.

In terms of the type of session – it doesn’t make too much of a difference to me; I guess, ultimately, I, like others, prefer the sessions where it’s hands on & you can do something/ contribute to a discussion – BUT – a really good paper session is much more useful than a poor workshop.

As to the timetable, inevitably interesting sessions seem to happen at the same time, positive tweets make you wonder if you selected the wrong session; discussions over coffee (or, as happened here, during sessions with other escapees, but not necessarily the coffee) are often as useful as those that are scheduled.

I think, like Graham, it was those interactions whether the vaguely formal F-ALT or the totally informal chats that were the most useful.

Don’t get me wrong, some sessions I felt went v. well – the VLE’s death; the session on Cognitive mapping [if only to confirm to me it's not for me], a session on student IT experience on entry [good to confirm what I feel - that the digitally native learner doeesn't really exist], and, as Graham mentioned, the Digital Identity session.

You refer to a thread of discussion around “is twitter killing blogging?”. My take on this had been quite different until I read your post – specifically that twitter is killing the ‘feed-reader’ rather than blogging itself. I.e. people still read and write blogs, but the way they discover new blog content is thru twitter, rather than by regularly firing up their preferred feed-reader. Did any of that surface in the discussions at ALT-C?

It sounds like another of those “critical” approaches that places primacy of “text” over activity. You know those folk who happily label everything as a “literacy” rather than an activity and competence in the activity.