Focussing on academics' professional identity, this paper analyses the challenges academics experience when adopting new technologies in their pedagogical practices. Notions of "economies of performance" and "ecologies of practice" as well as the concept of liminality are employed to understand this identity work. The paper illustrates how academics welcomed the potential of the web, despite the possible challenge to their authority. The paper argues that the process of changing pedagogical practices is experienced as risky and uncertain by some academics, and that it is a commitment to being a "good teacher" that helped these academics to overcome these feelings.