Blogging identities

I was just reading a colleague's essay on "Educational Blogging: A Writer's Place" and appreciating her quotes from James Paul Gee's book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. My conference co-author Michael knows the work of Gee, but I do not yet, and clearly I must because his comments about identity are intriguing for the reseach that Michael and I are doing on creating online identities and projecting oneself into a specific community. I will have to get that book and read what Gee has to say. I'm thinking that the effort to create and then project a teacherly identity, even if / especially if? - a virtual identity -- and see oneself as a real member of a real academic community of teaching colleagues - may indeed be easier online than in front of a classroom or in the halls of a department, though as a "digital immigrant" that wasn't how I did it. More on this soon.