Purpose Student exposure to illness-related theatrical performances holds intriguing educational possibilities. This project explored uses of theatrical performance within the context of medical education.Method Two 1-person shows, dramatically addressing AIDS and ovarian cancer, were presented to audiences totalling approximately 150 medical students, faculty, community doctors, staff and patients.Results Evaluations for both performances indicated increased understanding of the illness experience and greater empathy for patients. They also showed that respondents obtained additional insights into patient care issues, and developed new ways of thinking about their situations.Conclusions Presenting illness-related dramatic performances as an adjunct method of enhancing empathy and insight toward patients in a self-selected group of students, doctors, staff and patients was successful. Although this approach might not be effective with all learners, those who participated felt they gained important insights into the nature of the patient experience.

The use of new information technology in marketing education has been widely, and often uncritically, accepted as both inevitable and beneficial with little in-depth analysis of this phenomenon, which is both a new mode of teaching (and learning) and a competency domain in its own right. This article examines both the potential advantages and dangers of information technology in the context of creating knowledge workers for the marketing industry. Research findings are presented to illustrate that students have distinctively different learning profiles and experiences, and these affect how students respond to traditional and new technological modes of teaching. The authors suggest that acceptance of new technologies in education by students will rely heavily on the ability of educational institutions to manage the change process.

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HISTORIANS HAVE LONG BEEN ALLERGIC to psychological forms of explanation, so it seems unlikely that many will be eager to jump on the bandwagon of neuroscience or neurohistory. Despite many reasons for caution, an ongoing dialogue with neuroscience offers the prospect of new approaches to such perennially vexed issues as agency, experience, action, and identity. Neuroscience does not provide a handy model that historians can simply apply to their research. It functions more like psychoanalysis once did (and still does for some); as a field, it poses important questions and opens up new approaches to the mind, the self, and human behavior. Neuroscience is a fast-growing field that has gained much attention of late, especially at universities, but also among the general public. Membership in the Society for Neuroscience increased by 46 percent just between 2001 and 2010, to more than 41,000 members. 1 Research on the brain has increased exponentially since the development of new brain imaging techniques, especially the introduction of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the 1990s. Use of fMRI makes it possible to detect functional activation of different locations in the brain through measurements of blood volume changes or changes in the concentration of oxygen. In 1992, fMRI provided the experimental basis for just four publications. By 2007, the rate had reached eight per day. 2 Add to that the explosion of research at the cellular level of neurons, glial cells, and synapses in humans, mice, roundworms, sea slugs, and other animals, and the output is staggering. As might be expected, new books aiming to synthesize these studies are appearing at an accelerating rate, too. I cannot pretend to do justice here even to the synthetic works on the subject. The rapid expansion of research in neuroscience means that it is not a stable, fixed object. As historians have begun to test the waters of this field, it has rapidly become apparent that neuroscience can serve various ends; criticisms of humanists trying to engage neuroscience often include charges that they have read the wrong studies, misinterpreted the results of experiments, or worse yet, turned to neuroscience looking for a universalizing, anti-representational and anti-intentional ontology to bolster their claims. 3 But those debates notwithstanding, the question of the self is a

The polarisation of views on the introduction of ICT in education makes it hard to get a clear perspective on student attitudes to ICT, particularly in relation to other more traditional teaching modes. While the decision to use ICT may be pedagogically sound, resistance to its acceptance may discourage enthusiastic staff, sour student learning experiences and ultimately reduce institutions' ability to produce graduates who are computer-literate life long learners. This paper reports on a large scale study (n = 1,279) that compared student attitudes to a range of teaching modes, identified differences in attitude associated with demographic variables and examined the effect of student characteristics on such attitudes. Traditional teaching modes were found to be strongly preferred above all others. Technology and student-based teaching modes were the least preferred. Implications for developing collaborative learning communities on-line to promote greater learning autonomy and independent learners are discussed.