This paper looks at the relationship between socio- culturally situated identities and aspects affecting patterns of communication and participation in the context of a web-based Masters' programme in adult learning and global change. The programme in question spans over four continents and engages students with varied languages, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, enrolled at four different universities in Sweden, South Africa, Australia, and Canada. The basic approach to developing the programme has been to negotiate its content and delivery among four equal partners. The planning started in 1998 and the first group of students started in 2001. The Intercontinental Master's offers global perspectives on learning in cross-cultural environments. Courses are taught in collaboration amongst staff from the partner universities in the field of adult education. Students are admitted through each of the four partner universities so each cohort represents a complex four-continent network. One key feature of the programme, that uses Blackboard as its common course platform, is that interaction and between students through written communication is emphasised as a working method. The programme language is English. This means that the demands on language proficiency are high on the Swedish and South African students. The experiences from the first courses in the programme are that there is a large variation in students' participation in on-line discussions and communication. The study is focusing on students' reflections about their communication in the programme during the first semester and data was collected during a research workshop where students and teachers from South Africa and Sweden participated. The sources of the data are narratives that participants wrote about their life and its relation to the participation in the programme. Additional sources are notes taken from two group discussions with the students, of which one was tape-recorded. A discourse analysis was conducted aiming at contributing to the understanding of how the students construed the aspects of the situation as realized at the time and place of participating in the course and how the aspects of the situation give meaning to their reflections. The results suggest that the socio- culturally situated identities of the participants as presented on the web and conceived of by fellow students, are influenced not only by the presence, but also the absence of postings on the Discussion Board. The shaping of socio-culturally situated identities were highly interrelated to aspects of the material world such as the great differences in the efforts and costs for participating in the programme. In retrospect, we can reflect on our research process as starting out to inquiry about what was visible in the course statistics: the relatively large variation in participation frequency in the web-communication. When we became aware of what was not visible on the web, a pattern emerged that we can relate to a discussion about educational equity and our own discourse about the programme. The programme is thought to give all students a fair chance to take part in this masters' programme on equal terms. However, in such an inclusive approach it becomes clear that participation is requiring very different things for different students.