For economical reasons, today’s students in Swedish music teacher education are provided with a fraction of the tuition time that was considered necessary thirty years ago. Since there are no resources for instrumental tuition within the curriculum, alternative ways of encouraging students’ learning must be explored. The advance of, and access to, information and communication technologies (ICT) , has lead to new platforms and opportunities for learning music through social platforms for sharing, exchanging and collaborating in all stages of producing music. In less formalized settings for learning music, a whole new arena for learning music has consequently developed. As Väkevä (2010) states, informal settings for musical learning are no longer placed solely in garage bands: Through the advance of technology for communication, creating, sharing and interaction a set of new and extended arenas for learning music has developed. There is a growing body of research concerning the use of computer software in music education, but as yet there is no published research on using internet in learning to play a musical instrument. However, internet offers a plethora of guides, tips and tricks for playing different musical instruments. Georgii-Hemming and Kvarnhall ( 2011) have coined the expression “the digital music pedagogue” for YouTube-clips that are explicitly produced for didactical purposes. They emphasise that such didactical resources are lacking both the dialogical relation and the cultural historical situatedness that traditional institutional didactical contexts provide. They also tend to regard viewing and listening as mainly passive activities. However, it is an empirical question to what extent YouTube can be used for active learning purposes. A Google search on such an esoteric activity as to “learn accordion” returns 19 000 hits and a YouTube search on ”learn” + “accordion” returns over 2 000 hits. Clearly, there are vast resources at the fingertips of the internet-user and the question is to what extent these resources can be used for musical learning.

This presentation reports on  a project that lasted for half a year in 2011 and had a triple intention. 1) It was supposed to provide the students with experiences about learning how to play by help of the internet in ways similar to what some of their pupils-to-be possibly will be doing. 2) The students were to learn to play a second instrument besides their regular one – something which the new syllabus (Lgr11) requires from pupils. 3) The project aimed to investigate if and how out-of-school practices for learning an instrument aided by the Internet could be useful in music teacher training.