the workshop will explore the ideas of Digital identities, Personal Learning Environments and Learning Pathways and their impact and implications for vocational education and training. One of the cornerstones for individuals wanting to build sustainable lifelong learning strategies has been the promise of the ability to build an effective online identity, one that acts as a node or central place for building a digital persona and aggregating digital traces. This has mainly been explored via ePortfolios, Personal Learning Environments and Personal Aggregators, yet these tools and associated practices have not been fully implemented or accepted by the Vocational Education and Training community. Today it is virtually impossible to remain at the margins of digital life and the production of an online identity. New social software tools and services and lowered barriers to connectivity have driven fundamental changes in our relationship with the Internet where the democratisation of electronic content production means that individuals can now publish, comment on and tag material at negligible cost. The effect has been to massively increase the visibility of digital identities and shift their construction outside of the control of any one person: identity has become not only what one says about oneself, but also all that is said about one by others and also ones activity in any electronic exchange with both human and with intelligent agents. Furthermore, increasing levels of fragmentation and disaggregation have a destabilising effect on our sense of agency - our ability to act with intent and awareness and motivate ourselves and others to work for social change and educational benefits. The workshop will examine how learners can acquire the appropriate digital [identity] literacies and so be able to participate productively in lifelong learning related transactions such as self-representation, presentation of competences, ego-branding, job search, reflective learning, cooperation in communities of practice, peer-learning, social networking, self assessment, evaluation and accreditation. The workshop will further explore the implications of digital identities and Personal Learning Environments for the design and delivery of vocational education and training and for the roles of teachers and trainers. This will include the notion of personal learning pathways which may cut across existing competence schema and frameworks. Further issues to be explored included the social construction of learning and knowledge and its implications for curricula and learning design. Finally the workshop will consider future research needs in this area.

The workshop is based on work being carried out under a number of international projects: * The Eduserve Foundation Rhizome project on digital identities * The European Commission MOSEP project on e-Portoflios * The European Commission PWD project on Personal Learning Environments * The European Commission Mature project on PLEs and knowledge maturing. The workshop leaders will provide access to the work of these projects (both before and after the workshop) and will utilise the emergent project research and findings to design a participant led workshop to explore key issues and in particular to consider the implications of the research for competence development, institutional development, learning design and teaching and training practices in vocational education and training. It is intended that the workshop be highly interactive, with possibilities for post workshop follow up activities through the internet. The workshop will itself contribute to the outcomes of the Rhizome project.

The aim of the workshop is to explore emergent issues from a number of major European projects looking at Digital Identities, Personal Learning Environments and Learning Pathways. These issues are increasingly impacting on education at every level. The aim of the workshop is to look at the particular implications for vocational education and training. This sector has been largely unrepresented in existing research and literature. The workshop presenters will establish a web site prior to the workshop for participants. One aim for the workshop is to develop a series of outcomes which can be captured in digital media and these will be added to the website. Thus, through a participative and interactive design the workshop will disseminate existing and ongoing research, contribute to individual understandings of key issues for vocational education and training and will contribute to research knowledge in this domain.