Best Practices for Increasing and Maintaining Group Particiation

For our group project, I am interested in exploring the best curriculum and design strategies that increase student motivation and participate in social networking with E-learning 2.0 tools. Also, how to create group participation that is stemming from the students desire to participate, not because they are being graded, but because they want to and find it a valuable experience. One is example is providing tools and activities that correlate with various social Web 2.0 learning styles. Another could be Web 2.0 notification tools that help with creating and maintaining group cohesion, such as Twitter, etc. Of course that there are so many other more aspects that we could explore. The focus could be very specific to very general. I am open.

Since I am creating a self-paced course, students may be a different places in curriculum. Thus participating and sustaining collaborative learning can be a challenge. Finding a way to leveraging every opportunity to increase motivation and participation is imperative. I think that this challenge would be a subject that would also be pertinent to all types of courses, whether cohort or self-paced.