1 Introduction

In recent years, it has been possible to see the development of technologies for the didactics especially through the use of the web. These technologies permitted to strengthen the concept of learning process as a journey where the experience is the fuel to carry on. Indeed, learning can be defined as a change in behaviour or perception as a result of experience (Andrew et al. 2015). Motivation is a simple principle behind this: if the student is ready to learn and has a strong determination, clear objectives and well-founded reasons to learn, he/she will make better progress than in the absence of all that (Chance 1979; Breedlove et al. 2007; Gallistel 2008). The way in which the student perceive his/her competences is an important motivational precursor of learning process results (Marsh et al. 2005; Simpkins et al. 2006).

When the teacher introduces new technologies in the learning process, it is important to understand their impact and the way in which they are perceived by the students: learning is reinforced when it is accompanied by enjoyable or satisfying sensations (Tyng et al. 2017). New technologies must be an incentive for the student to participate actively in the learning process (Della Ventura 2017; Della Ventura 2018).

From these considerations, it follows that it is very important: to create a comfortable learning environment where the actors (students, teachers and tutor) can collaborate all together (Richardson and Mishra 2018) and to develop communication among students (teachers and tutors) using a language suitable for all of them (dyslexic and non-dyslexic students) (Della Ventura 2018).

Students need to feel a connection with their peers: isolation from them can have a marked impact on their school achievements (Furrer et al. 2014). A student could have difficulties to speak with his classmates, and instead of running this risk, he may withdraw from his classmates and choose to spend time alone.

When students (teachers and tutors) speak all together, they can share knowledge and experiences. In this way it is possible to generate “curiosity” (Litman and Spielberger 2003): it may be defined as a desire to know, to see, or to experience that motivates exploratory behaviour directed towards the acquisition of new information (Litman 2005; Litman and Jimerson 2004). Through the curiosity it is possible to transform the observation into “findings” (Åkerström 2013): serendipitous learning.

It is not the simple introduction of technologies into the classroom that can create innovation in didactics: cultural change is needed in order to go beyond the concept of the classroom being the context within which knowledge is passed on, to the learning environment intentionally designed by the teacher, in which students use different technologies in an integrated manner, taking advantage of their potentialities and allowing the students to become protagonists in the knowledge-building process (Rivoltella 2015).

The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of the emotional aspect in a learning process, which may facilitate the collaborative learning with the use of the social network Facebook. This research refers to a project developed in the last year of a Music High School, and the discipline object of the project was Music Technology. Facebook has been used for three main reasons: firstly, in order to use a technology knew by the students, permitting them to feel comfortable in the new learning process (emotional aspect); secondly, it represents a messaging application that allows to share images, videos, audio and text messages, creating a sort of repository available and accessible everywhere and anytime by the students (public/collaborative aspect); and, finally, to investigate the interests of the students in order to create their curiosity, leading them to discover new concepts connected with the subject of the process (serendipitous aspect).

The analysis of the learning process was done analysing the conversation on the social network and representing the results with a 3D graphic of the “Virtual Show & Tell” that considered three opposite qualities related to the students: objective/emotional, private/public and traditional/technological.

This paper is organized as follows.

Section 9.2 presents the social network and describes the roles of emotion and motivation. This is followed by a description of the social network as a research tool. Section 9.3 explains the concept of “serendipity” and presents the important factors for consideration in experimental design of the learning environment. Section 9.4 describes the tool “3D Virtual Show & Tell” used for the analysis and assessment of the learning process. Section 9.5 shows an experimental test that illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Finally, in Sect. 9.6 the paper ends with concluding remarks on the current issues and future research possibilities with respect to the efficient enhancement of educational practices and technologies.

2 The Social Network

During the last few years, a big transformation has occurred in the way in which people use Internet. The social network has completely opened and modified the frontiers of digital communication (Fini 2009). It is a web-based platform that permits and facilitates people to generate and share content with other people, allowing the interactions among them. Every day, most of the students (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010) use the social network to exchange opinions, describe everyday facts or personal situations and reply to or make suggestions to the so-called friends.

The users can write a message, upload an image or a video and show their mood (or emotion) using not only words but also the emoticons. The use of the emoticons represents a new form of (social) communication. Emoticons are effective to improve personal interaction and the importance of information perceived through messages: a smiling face online is similar to see a smiling face in real life, and sometimes it is more immediate and rewarding than reading a word (Felbo et al. 2017). Using a right emoticon, it is possible to change the perception about a message that we could define a “negative message”.

This environment by itself can guarantee the students the opportunity to enhance their knowledge and their level of information, if they take into consideration the opportunity to compare and interact with others, be them peers or not (Lampe et al. 2006). In this way, the social network can become a sort of “search engine” because the “friends” can:

  • Directly provide links to specific online resources, as a consequence of a personal research or information supplied by other “friends” who are not in the list of the student performing the research.

  • Make suggestions with regard to the word or the words to be used for the research, on the basis of their own knowledge or information supplied by other “friends” not in the list of the student performing the research. The recommended work might be directly or indirectly correlated to the topic forming the object of the research (and derived from personal knowledge or experience).

On the base of the above considerations, with the social network, it is possible to build a circularity between emotions and the learning context, in which the emotions are reflected outside of the learning context with certain behaviours that are conditioned by the external context and generating further emotions that influencing thought and producing new behaviours. The emotional dimension, therefore, influences the entire learning process and leads the student to perceive himself and the context according to the situations experienced. This means that students could be motivated or unmotivated by the events occurring during the learning process.

The teachers must take into considerations the needs of every student and be careful to every aspect of the learning process to encourage all students in taking part in the activities and avoid the isolation of some of them.

This brief overview of the social network is enough to understand its potentialities with respect to the “motivation” factor, and it highlights certain relevant characteristics that may respond to the needs of a dyslexic student or a shy student: characteristics that may help him/her to integrate spontaneously into the group work, rather than isolate himself/herself (Della Ventura 2016). The dyslexic student has intuition, the capacity to synthesize and the problem-solving capacity. The conciseness of the messages helps the students who have a hard time reading, and it does not tire them when learning the content; the insertion of tags helps them in the text analysis; the possibility to write short messages helps them to develop the capacity to formulate a question or an answer (moreover, the automatic spell checker, already present in all devices, allows them to avoid possible spelling errors); the possibility to intervene when they want helps the students to organize and manage their time (Della Ventura 2018).

In conclusion, the technology permits the collaborative work that influences the emotions and vice versa: the emotions influence the work group that permits the use of the technologies.

3 Serendipity and Learning

If the student actively participates in learning process activities, it may be encouraged to look for new information to propose to other students, on the base of the feedbacks produced by all students. This research could lead to discover something unexpected and important that has nothing to do with the object of the research.

In this case it is possible to speak of “serendipitous learning”. What is important about it is that it is not subject to pure randomness but is influenced by personal goals, interests and previous knowledge (Fine and Deegan 1996; Gritton 2007).

Considering important and significant the unrelated information requires the ability to recognize patterns and implications of such discoveries (Fine and Deegan 1996). If the student identifies a particular unexpected information as relevant and meaningful depends on being prepared to recognize a potential of the new information.

The serendipitous learning is not planned by the teacher or by the student, but the teacher can promote it if the student feels comfortable (emotional aspect) and able to share information using the technologies (technological aspect) in the work group (social aspect). Therefore, it is possible to summarize the conditions that are favourable for serendipity as follows:

  • Active learning (collaboratively work among students)

  • Relationships (social connection and interactions among students)

  • Insight (ability to make deduction about new concepts)

  • Intentional search (serendipity has as a starting point of an intentional search process)

Serendipitous events are exciting, inspiring and meaningful, and they permit to go beyond planned and predesigned instruction (Riley 2007). Gaining new insights and discovering interesting connections between seemingly unrelated concepts are rewarding learning experiences which may generate important research ideas, transform current assumptions and encourage exploration and investigation leading to construction of new knowledge.

The social network represents a learning environment able to facilitate the serendipitous learning.

4 The 3D Virtual Show & Tell

In its earliest formulation (Ciolfi and Cooke 2006), the “Virtual Show & Tell” method, used as an aid in the analysis of a specific domain, consisted in a 2D plane (Cartesian diagram) where on the axis were expressed the highest level of certain opposite qualities (i.e. functional/objective-emotional, traditional-technological, social-private, etc.) (Giovannella and Camusi 2008).

The “3D Virtual Show & Tell” tool consists of a Cartesian diagram that permits to analyse the learning process. It associates three opposite qualities related to the students (Fig. 9.1): the emotional/objective aspect (i.e. if the detected data has a personal or useful value) with the private/public aspect (i.e. if the detected data has a personal value or is open to many people) and with the traditional/technological aspect (i.e. if detected data refers to a digital technology or not).

Fig. 9.1
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3D Show & Tell

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The various detected data are represented by coloured circles, the size of which changes based on the percentage of the detected students and the colour of which changes based on the fact that the indicator is representing a positive (useful) element (black) or a negative (accessory) element (red) in the observed data.

Once collected, the data must be represented on the graphic. The representation permits observations on the necessity to intervene on the learning process: it supplies important information about the correspondence between the problem setting and the answers provided by the design intervention. From there, it follows that, firstly, the teacher has to define the aim of the learning process and present it to the students; secondly, the teacher has to identify a set of quality indicators that permit to monitor the behaviours of the students (i.e. reply to a classmate message, language used in the message/conversation analysis (Della Ventura 2018), types of technologies used, types of resources found and proposed, etc.) during the learning process, trying to recognize strengths and weaknesses, opportunity and threats; and, finally, the teacher has to adopt the necessary changes to improve the learning process and facilitate the change in the students’ perception and feelings about the process.

In the following paragraph, an example of application of the methodology described above will be shown.

5 Application and Analysis/Research Method

This research presents a case study referred to a Music Technologies teaching project in a High Music School. Music Technology is a complex discipline because of the countless technical terms that it deals with: that is why students often experience a feeling of incapacity which leads to disesteem and ultimately to an educational failure.

The research involved the students enrolled in the final year of their musical studies, and it was conducted for a time period of 3 months (from March 2018 to May 2018: 12 weeks). Of the students included in the study, 17 (65%) were female of which 3 were affected by dyslexia, and 9 (35%) were male.

The aim of this project was to check on and assess the impact of the use of the social network Facebook in the students’ learning process: increase the student’s motivation in order to see if it corresponds to an improvement of his/her academic results. At the same time, the teacher had to monitor the behaviour of the students (trying to reduce the impact of the weaknesses and of the threats) giving value to the elements favourable to the serendipitous learning:

  • With regard to learning: relationships, experiences and insights

  • With regard to behaviour: commitment, curiosity and differences of opinions

Everything was done stimulating discussions, researches, reflections and recombination of the information.

In this new learning context, the teacher developed some indicators to evaluate the (ongoing) learning process (see Table 9.1): each one of these elements could be considered positive (useful) elements (U) or negative (accessory) elements (A) for the learning process, on the base of the number of detected students.

Table 9.1 Excerpt from the list of the indicators to evaluate the (ongoing) learning process
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The concepts explained and assessed by the teacher during the period of this research (digital filters, additive synthesis, convolution) were selected as topics to evaluate the effectiveness of the method. At the start of this study, a list of words/concepts and some lecture notes were given to students. Facebook was used for real homework asking students to resolve problems, search for information or build artefacts (for instance, relationships among concepts), thus giving more meaning to the needs of knowledge and of commitment.

The process on Facebook was monitored weekly updating the value of the indicators (see Table 1) and showing them on the “3D Show & Tell”. Figure 9.2 shows the indicators at the end of the second week.

Fig. 9.2
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3D Show & Tell of the second week of the process

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From an analysis of these elements, it is possible to note how the students were conditioned by the traditional methods of lesson (their attention was directed towards the objective/traditional/personal area). They preferred to use (traditional) books rather than the web to find information (eBooks, Forums, Articles, etc.); they didn’t pay attention to the language used in their messages (that means little attention towards the dyslexic students); they asked question to the teacher rather than to the students (to solve a doubt or a problem, to receive a suggestion, etc.); they used little images or videos only for strictly personal purposes; they were concentrated to make personal interventions rather than to read the interventions of classmates and replying them.

From these considerations and based on the classroom group structure (that included three dyslexic students), the first choice of the teacher was to ask students to assess the group work: evaluating their own teamwork skills and their contributions to the group’s process and evaluating the group’s dynamics and the contributions of their classmates. At the same time, the teacher to focus students’ thinking in way that was creative, challenging and motivating proposed some interesting and challenging assignments, for example, to watch two different videos where the same person spoke in a “formal interview” and in an “informal interview”, trying to identify the different characteristics of the voice, and to listen to an audio file in live streaming and in on-demand streaming”, trying to identify the different characteristics of the voice.

The aim of the teacher was to move the attention of the analysis of the process towards the emotional/technological/social area, to increase the possibility of the serendipitous learning.

In the following weeks, the conversation on Facebook changed: some students, following the suggestions of the teacher, began to propose some new concepts found on the web and related to the teacher’s requests. The most interesting thing was the enthusiasm of these students in presenting their findings to the other classmates: results obtained with personal research on the web and with suggestions of some “personal friends” on Facebook. The language used in the messages was also suitable for dyslexic students. The curiosity of the other students led them to find links to videos or audio files in which there were the new concepts.

At the end of the process, students increased their own vocabulary of technological terms/concepts with the findings of the classmates (at about 13 new terms/concepts), and the explanation of each one of these terms was done with a group work on Facebook. Figure 9.3 shows the indicators of the last week of the process.

Fig. 9.3
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3D Show & Tell of the last week of the process

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In the graphic it is possible to note the changes in the position of the indicators (from the objective/traditional/personal area to the emotional/technological/social area): one of the important points that emerged is related to the fact that all the students worked together in solving problems or doubts, accepting and discussing the feedbacks and motivating their own statement. They changed the sources of their researches: from hard books to eBooks, forums and articles (also on the base of some advices received by the “personal friends” on Facebook).

There was a general improvement within the classroom and, above all, for the dyslexic students, two of which managed to perform the delivery without using the compensatory tools and/or the dispensatory measures.

6 Discussion and Conclusions

The most recent online digital technologies are important tools to create new methodologies able to make learning process more efficient and effective by using collaborative approaches. In these contexts, it is important to take into consideration and analyse the conversation used in the learning environments, because the conversation has to promote learning for all students. They have the opportunity to deal with a big flow of information; therefore, they have to be able to understand the concepts or recognize new concepts (serendipitous learning) and become proactive in searching valuable information.

Serendipitous learning is stimulating, and for this reason collaborative works must be encouraged: they permit to share information and experiences that can generate new research ideas.

The teacher has to become the provider of guidance about technologies used in the learning process. He/she has to take into account the learning styles of the students to promote the use of the technologies in a favourable learning environment where students feel comfortable and able to share information (the representation plan is defined by the axis technology-emotional-public).

This is the result of well-structured learning environment where learners are involved with particular subjects and work with other students/teachers and where the knowledge is easily accessible.