Dr Tankiso Dikibo is an independent businesswoman and entrepreneur who also specialises in project management. She has also been involved in applied research, training and facilitation in relation to economic development, rural planning, land reform, participatory rural appraisal, poverty eradication, and promoting sustainable livelihoods in the Free State, Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga, Lesotho and Botswana. She works in action-learning processes with government, civil society and business, providing advice, facilitation, action research, implementation, leadership training (particularly for women), and sharing of experience primarily with governments (local, provincial, national and international), civil society, corporate managers and donors, and communities themselves. Formerly an employee of the Ministry of Agriculture in Lesotho, she has also taught Biological Sciences at the University of Lagos. She was a co-founder and board member of the African Institute for Community Driven Development (AICDD, formerly Khanya – managing rural change) and is a board member of the Central University of Technology’s Science Park.

She holds a doctorate in agriculture (with specialisation in plant pathology) from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK) and a BSc degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland (UBLS, Roma).

Dr Graham Stewart is Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Design, and Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Languages and Communication at the Durban University of Technology. His research interests encompass both Southern African literature and digital technologies. He has published in the fields of literary criticism and education, while web-based teaching and learning have influenced his work in academic development. He has a long-standing interest in bringing South African literary and cultural heritage into a networked digital domain and by so doing, making these resources widely accessible to readers, researchers and learners. Together with Prof Johan van Wyk, he compiled an electronic encyclopaedia of Southern African literature in the late 1990s and subsequently joined Prof Lindy Stiebel’s KwaZulu-Natal Literary Tourism Project team.

He holds a BA degree and a University Education Diploma from the University of Natal; BA Honours from the University of South Africa; MA from the University of Natal; and D.Litt from the University of Durban-Westville. He also has an Advanced Certificate in Television Arts from Natal Technikon.

Dr Michael Wessels is a researcher attached to the Centre of African Literary Studies and the English Department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg. He has published a number of articles on the /Xam materials that comprise the Bleek and Lloyd collection. These articles offer analysis of particular /Xam narratives or discuss the different kinds of writing that have been produced in relation to the collection over the years. He is also an educator who is involved in teacher education and in the provision of academic guidance to university students.

Wessels, who serves as Research Coordinator in the Office of the ESAACH Project Leader and General Editor, holds a doctorate in English from the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Niall McNulty is an on-line communication and content specialist, focused on the digitisation of culture and heritage collections.  He has been instrumental in setting up the KZN Literary Tourism's on-line literature archive and the eThekwini Municipality's indigenous knowledge programme. He has also created digital archives for the academic journals Transformation and Current Writing and developed a content management system for the Centre for Critical Research on Race Identity.

In 2005 he was awarded his Masters in English from the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Preggy Reddy has been involved in online learning since 2000 when he first assisted Prof Graham Stewart in piloting the WebCT (Learning Management System) for the National Research Foundation project "Information Literacy for Researchers".

In 2001 he joined the Online Learning Centre of Technikon Natal (now Durban University of Technology - DUT) as an Online Learning Skills Consultant/Information Coordinator for a period of two years, being instrumental in training academics in the realms of technical skills (html) to enable their development of Online Classrooms.

He then worked as an Information Officer in a technical library for a period of three years before returning to DUT in 2006.
Since 2008 he has been Server Administrator of the WebCT servers, and from April this year (2009) he will be seconded into an Educational Technologist post and resume training of academics implementing e-learning at DUT.

He has a BTECH:LIS and is currently enrolled in the MTECH:CALT (Computer-Aided Language Teaching) in the Department of Media, Languages and Communication at DUT.