We are all musical: Investigating improvisation as collaborative creativity

This chapter examines recent literature on sociocultural learning in order to explore challenges and possibilities related to facilitating and supporting a technology-enhanced collaborative inquiry in a culturally diverse context of music-making. It addresses the questions related to collaboration, creativity and new media through the case of Opera by You, an online project that aimed to bring people from all over the world to work together online in the making of a full-scale opera. The full-scale opera was later performed on the main stage of Savonlinna, a distinguished opera festival in Finland. The music classroom becomes a place in which collaborative work is orchestrated to promote a ‘kaleidoscopic’ process of making music. In the context of the OBY online community, the knowledge-creation metaphor was understood to provide a means to examines the ways in which ‘the individual initiative serves the communal effort to create something new, and the social environment feeds the individual initiative and cognitive growth’.