Seeking the Holy Grail in learners' engagement

Honestly, I have never taken into account Facebook as a potential tool for teaching and learning. I would never recommend to be friend with your students, and vice versa would never expect that students' would be friends with their teachers. Simply put, there are too many private aspects that it is good to keep separated between students and teachers. With my great surprise, I instead discovered a rich literature on the topic: it is at least 10 years that there exist empirical observations on the adoption and effects of Facebook in teaching and learning activities [1]. In particular, the typical way of working is to create groups for a course: with the right settings, group members are only students, possibly together with teachers, without the need of being friends on Facebook [2]. This indeed is a reasonable approach, that alleviates a lot of the doubts related to privacy, both for the teacher and the students: in fact, a group creates a kind of private island on Facebook where ...

  I am participating to a course on Problem-Based Learning (PBL) with the intent of finding new ways of motivating students to engage in their learning process. Here, for students I mean the more general category of people that commit to some training endeavour, including both academy and industry. As a matter of fact, a quite widespread problem with training is keeping students engaged in pursuing their studies. This is not a recent issue, it is enough to consider that many of the teaching and learning theories about learning styles have been investigated as a need of understanding why some students performed much better that others, regardless the topic and/or the teacher. (Image found somewhere on the web) I started reflecting more on my personal experiences as a "student", my driving motivations and faced difficulties affecting my engagement. One conclusion I can surely make is that the engagement has effectively worked each time I was the donkey in the middle of the ...