| Summary: | This thesis explores the lived experience of qualified music educators and how they perceive, navigate and leverage the affordances of the web-based digital video tool, YouTube. The personal and professional value of YouTube in terms of learning, teaching and sharing both in situ, as classroom-based professional music practitioners and ex situ, beyond the classroom for lifelong musicians is revealed through participant led narrative and idiographic explication. A, purposive, homogenised sample of eight participants were interviewed and one pilot study was conducted using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) as the methodology. The results show that a paradigm shift has occurred in the way that the participants learn and in the way they share and appropriate learning using YouTube. It was found that YouTube was universally valued as an archive or repository of exponentially increasing musical information. However, YouTube’s integration into the school environment raised considerable issues of ‘model conflict’, practitioner autonomy and systemic control. YouTube was found unsuitable as a ’bolt-on’ technology, since it can create dual and often-conflicting realities within a single controlled and systematised learning space. My original contribution to knowledge is the exposition of the paradigmatic effect of YouTube on music learning, teaching and sharing and the reciprocal shifts in the professional and the personal praxes of eight music educators. Supporting this contribution is my reappraisal of Berlyne's (1954, 1960, 1966, 1978) seminal work on epistemic and perceptual curiosity. This thesis transports Berlyne's theoretical descriptors for the differing types of terrestrial exploratory behaviours and their motivators, via the concept of an expanded perceptual reality, from the physical environment and into the virtual environment of YouTube. This offers a theoretically underpinned lexicography to the academy to accurately categorise YouTube use and users and to describe their non-linear navigation and exploratory behaviours within teacher-led, mediated and user-generated creative learning contexts.
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