In the early days, the Internet was dominantly discussed as a space for searching and finding information, then as a space for communication. For the last years and especially since the transformation to a Social Web, the Internet gains importance as a learning space as well as a cultural space.

The Internet in general – and social networks, wikis and weblogs in particular – turned out to be places of communication, cooperation and participation, where specific informal learning cultures emerge. These emerging learning cultures are essential from a pedagogical point of view for several reasons – most fundamentally, they represent new and specific ways of establishing a relation to the object world, to the social world and to oneself.

For several years, the main focus of the Internet as a learning space laid on the creation of formal learning settings and on settings of blended learning. But today, its potential for informal learning becomes apparent:

The proposed paper focusses on emerging informal learning cultures by discussing results of a casestudy.  Based on a structural analysis of the potential of an online environment from a didactical perspective (which was presented at the ECER conference in Berlin 2011), specific cases of using this structure are reconstructed:

• How the specific structure of the online environment is used?
• Which processes of usage can be reconstructed?
• Which processes of usage can be interpreted as informal learning?
• Which forms of communication, cooperation and participation are used?
• How the structural potential is actually translated into performance?

By this, the perspective of performance is emphazised as the complementary side of structure and the specific relation of structure and performance will be discussed (using the example of ultimate-guitar.com.

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