Presence, identity, and the cloud of knowing

Within the module of the MSc (E-learning, Politics, and Society) it has often been the case that the members of the course have engaged with a number of differing means of communication in order to engage with each other. As the course is run entirely online, these contacts have been mediated through the technologies that have been used, the participants have never "met" in a face-to-face geo-spatial sense, and may never actually meet as corporeal entities. This paper will investigate what this "detached" inter-relation says about who and how the individuals on the course ?are?. After a brief discussion around what ?identity? may mean, the rest of the paper will concentrate on how the creation (no matter how unconscious) of an online identity becomes part of the individual?s total ?identity?, and how this may be assisted or hindered by engaging in e-learning.