Objective: To determine whether a short-term placement of metropolitan medical students in a rural environment can improve their knowledge of, and change their attitudes to, rural health issues. Design and participants: Medical students taking part in the March and May 2013 3-week Rural Health Modules (RHMs) were invited to participate in focus groups and complete questionnaires before undertaking the RHM, after a 2-day rural orientation and at the end of the RHM. Students were asked to comment on a range of issues aff ecting rural health care including their attitude to pursuing a rural career. Focus group transcripts were thematically analysed and questionnaire data were statistically analysed. Setting: The RHM is a 3-week program designed and run by the University of Melbourne's Rural Health Academic Centre. Main outcome measures: Responses to questionnaire items from before and after completing the RHM, scored on a seven-point Likert scale.

The intensification of globalising flows associated with the current condition of globalisation has had a significant impact on the ways that people relate to, talk about, and construct place. In the context of non-urban places, impacts of globalisation are felt by young people who are uniquely 'embedded' in local places. However, the ways that young people construct place under these conditions is opaque and complex. This article addresses Farrugia, D. (2014). Journal of Youth Studies 17 (3) pp. 293-307 call for greater focus on the experiences of young rural people constructing place under the conditions of globalisation. A recent focus group study in regional Australian with 16-28 year-old people builds on the work of rural sociologists investigating this area. Placemaking is demonstrated for analysis in this article through young people's discursive narratives combined with verbal expressions of a more experiential and embodied placemaking practice. This article illustrates that young people's place-making 'beyond the metropole' endures in robust and unique ways.

Students undergoing a rural LIC feel more confident in their clinical skills and preparedness for practice than other rural students. This study supports the use of LICs as a powerful educational tool.

The use of information technologies by young people is commonly understood to be a separate, often risky, activity and a distinct form of sociality. Challenging the dominant understanding, this article applies Haraway's cyborg theory to explore how Facebook-mediated relationships are interconnected with material relationships and daily social life. Young people's perspectives are privileged through 40 face-to-face interviews in two rural Victorian towns. The cyborg metaphor highlights the fluid melding of various conceptual dualisms altered in the overlap between the virtual environs of Facebook and the material, everyday lives of the young participants, analysed here using the cyborg metaphor. In this sense, Facebook can be best understood as an individualised extension of young people's broader social lives, part of a larger suite of information technologies, social media and other mediated sociality that is interconnected with materially based, face-toface interactions.