Back from a quick trip to Ireland, Wales and England. On the way back, just outside Hanover airport, someone managed to ram my taxi at about 120 kilometres an hour. I am fine but my poor Powerbook is seriously injured. Having been literally cut from the wreck it has only about half the screen pixels working and the case is bent and torn open. But it still works! Have got an external keyboard and screen until I can find someone to sell me a new one (Apple supply is as crazy as usual).

Anyway, the main point of this entry is a quick reflection on the technology kids were going for this Christmas. I spent Christmas day and Boxing day in Derby in England with my brother, his partner and their three children - all girls - aged 15, 12 and 10, and my parents.

Usual obscene orgy of conspicuous consumption. Why does the UK go in for such wild consumer excesses at Christmas?

The big Christmas success were vaious music machines. Chritmas day and boxing day me and the kids were queing up for use of the computers for sharing our music whilst the other grown ups looked on in bemusement.

But the other big hit was something called the Dance Mat - a foot driven inetrface for the play station - providing different levels of difficulty in dancing on eight different key pads in time with the music and the on-sceen instructions. All accompanyed by computer generated encouragement such as "You're looking good", "Keep it up" - or rising crescendos og booing when the footwork fell out of pace. A few things interested me here. First was the fascinations of the kids and their dogged detrmination to improve their skills and scores. Unfortunaely the youngest one decided to base her efforts on a Spice Girls song! Ther second wa sthat although an on-screen androgenous digitalised dancer seemd to dance to the music and provide guidance ot the steps, the reality was far from it. It was far more a exercise in aerobics than in dancing. And of course there was no creativity or room to make up your own inetrpretations of the music.

But, on the plus side, it showed the potential for completely different interfaces to a computer for learning. Why are we so tied to the keyboard as an input device? But also it points again to the games industry being far more imagoinitive in design than the education technology providers. Lets hope that is soon to change.

More on this later this week.