At the Dalarna University (Sweden), which is specialized in online education, there has been a three-year research project called “Informal Learning Environment”, which explored the educational aspects of fan activities and possible ways to apply them in foreign language and literature courses. One part of the project was a study, conducted in two stages. First, an online questionnaire survey on the language student’s awareness about online fan activities, as well as their participation in those, was carried out. In the second stage, seven students that were actively participating in various fan activities were interviewed. The interviews examined the qualitative aspects of the participants’ involvement in fan communities with four different question areas: In what kind of fan activities do they participate?; Why do they participate, and what makes participation attractive to them?; What kind of knowledge and skills (such as language or cultural or other skills) do they think they have developed through participation?; and do they think it is possible to apply this mechanism of informal learning to the university courses? We also asked whether they see any connection between informal learning in the fan communities and their learning at university / college.During the project (which includes the actual application of some fan activities to the courses), various educational elements of fan activities have become clear. In this proposed paper we do the final analysis of the aforementioned study with a focus on the curiosity and playfulness that we could see in this informal learning. Based on the interviews, we will analyze the motivation / mechanism for the intensive learning processes that seem to take place outside the classroom.