Fairytales in ICT: a cautionary tale

In an adult, post-tertiary version of stories around a campfire, we listen to a storyteller weave a wondrous and shiny reality for us as we sip coffee in a trendy coffee spot. It’s a story of vision, adventures and risk-taking, of globalization and of computer technology. Globalization, we are told, is a wonderful process which makes the world more accessible, where net-based communities will erode the barriers to learning and build partnerships to knowledge through establishment of learning communities. We need only embrace this vision. Fuelled by this glorious fairy tale, we set out to enter this shiny new world. We wrote a small campside story of our own, and secured funding to set us on the trail of this liberated world. Each of us has a story to tell of the ensuing development within our respective disciplines. The reality is new tensions created by competing demands on our time to meet the new expectations, infrastructure limitations and the perennial worry of academics to maintain research productivity as well as teaching excellence. Our individual stories form part of this paper. Each is a tale of some success - even elation, much frustration and some measured cynicism in the fairytale. We want to believe in the fairytale but at what cost?