Today's Rendezvous workshop on Neuroscience and TEL was openend with a keynote given by Dan Schwartz, Stanford. Dan looked at achievements in this truly interdisciplinary area in the 'happy triangle' between education, technology, and biology. And it seems that there is still a huge gap that reflects not only in the differing research interests, but also in the types of questions being asked.

Compelling findings presented include a study that demonstrates that it is possible to reduce chronically ill patient's pain by biofeedback-assisted learning of how to cope with it or the effect of changing expressed emotions when delivering feedback through animated avatars in his research on teachable agents.

Still it seems that in this happy triangle, the fields are not yet profiting from each other: imaging techniques often lead to reductionist educational models (or hypothesis testing) and enthusiastic overestimation of what the technology actually can develop. Surely a call for more research in this area!