Chamara Kumara

 Topic 3 - Learning in communities – networked collaborative learning Let me start my reflections by giving out real-life experience related to networked collaborative learning. This might not directly related to teaching but definitely a learning experience for me.   So me and one of my collogue was asked to write two project proposals to get funding for our post-doc research. we had to come up with a 12-page document within two weeks that covers so many aspects related to the project including comprehensive budgeting, time plan, companies, and how collaboration is achieved between industry and academia. For both of us, it was the first time we had to do such a task and did not know where to start and what expectations to be full filled. The first thing we did was asking around from our colleagues who also have written similar applications before. So we had a couple of discussions with them and got their project proposals as a guide to help us in writing. This gave us an accelerated

 Topic 2: Open Learning – Sharing and Openness This was also an eye-opening week for me. Stepped on to a topic which I my self has used while I was doing my PhD studies, but never thought about it too much. After listening to the  Ted talk  by David Wiley and reading through the article by  Maha Bali et al . I was able to broaden up my view that I had on open learning. For me, open learning is getting access to education irrespective of wealth, gender, religion,  citizenship etc. But at the end of the  2 weeks working on this, I was able to see that open learning is not only about getting free access to educational resources at any time from anywhere in the world. It also about openness in the pedagogical aspect of it. After reading the blog post on the topic of  What is Open Pedagogy?  by David Wiley, I realized that most of my educational efforts were on creating Disposable Assignments. This was eye-opening for me. I am sure that I try my best to avoid these type of assignments in my