1The Voice in the Wilderness: Enabling Online Teachers and Tutors to Tame Learning Technologies

Higher Education (H.E.) is facing the complexity, strangeness and contradictions of a transformation the like of which no generation has seen before. Societies are in the midst of a fundamental rupture with the past that involves both loss and gain (Stille, 2002). The patterns of the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) cannot easily be determined, as the ways people adopt and use new forms of technologies are largely unpredictable. The introduction of ICT into these complex territories can result in academic deskilling rather than enskilling. Teachers and researchers in H.E. face a greater variety of tasks with fewer resources. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) may increase these trends unless we recognise it for what it truly is – a tool and a medium to be embraced, moulded and shaped to our purposes. Using the metaphor of taming the wildness of the new landscape, this chapter explores the importance of the role of the human mediators in the support of online learners, giving an example of how their skills can be developed through the online medium. 1. About the Wildness Although most learners are comfortable and familiar with the use of new technologies i