Janice Waldron

YouTube, fanvids, forums, vlogs and blogs: Informal music learning in a convergent on- and offline music community

In this paper I examine the music learning and teaching in the Banjo Hangout online music community (www.banjohangout.org/) using cyber ethnographic methods of interview and participant observation conducted entirely through computer-mediated communication, which includes Skype and written narrative texts – forum posts, email, chat room conversations – along with hyperlinks to YouTube and other Internet music-learning resources. The Hangout is an example of an online community based on the pre-existing offline interests of its founding members and it is thus connected to and overlaps with the offline Old Time and Bluegrass music banjo communities. Although I focus on the Banjo Hangout online community, this study also provides peripheral glimpses – embedded in the participants’ narratives – into the offline Old Time and Bluegrass banjo communities of practice. As a cyber ethnographic field study, this research also highlights the epistemological differences between on- and offline community as reflected in music education online narrative qualitative research and research practice.

User-generated content, YouTube and participatory culture on the Web: music learning and teaching in two contrasting online communities

In this paper, I draw on seminal literature from new media researchers to frame the broader implications that user-generated content (UGC), YouTube, and participatory culture have for music learning and teaching in online communities; to illustrate, I use examples from two contrasting online music communities, the Online Academy of Irish Traditional Music (OAIM, www.owim.ie) and the Banjo Hangout (www.banjohangout.org). The different ways people employ UGC such as YouTube videos for music learning and teaching in online participatory communities has significant implications for music learning and teaching in on and offline contexts.

A brave new world: theory to practice in participatory culture and music learning and teaching

ABSTRACT The four perspectives in this paper were first presented as an interactive research/workshop symposium at RIME 9. The purpose of the symposium was to connect new media scholar Henry Jenkins’s theory of ‘participatory culture’ (1992, 2006, 2009) to possible practices of ‘participatory culture’ in diverse music teaching and learning contexts. We ask: If participatory culture exists in music learning contexts – what is it? What are its dimensions? What does participatory culture look like and mean in other music cultures and different contexts/‘places’ (e.g. online, offline, and convergent settings)? Who can and who can’t participate? How might this idea cause us to re-think some of our practices?