89 A Reflective Pit Stop on an Open Dissertation Journey
Speaker
Gabi Witthaus
Abstract
This GASTA presentation will take participants on a reflective journey through aspects of the process of sharing my dissertation work-in-progress in the open (Witthaus, 2021). It starts by outlining some of the purposes and benefits of sharing research processes and content openly (e.g. Quent, 2019), and then looks ahead towards the hoped-for destination, with reference to some inspirational examples from scholars within the OER/OEP community who have successfully completed the PhD journey (e.g., Belshaw 2012, Stewart 2015; Nerantzi, 2017). I show how my own open dissertation uses the features of a Google Sites domain to integrate dissemination with my writing and review processes, and outline a few of the ethical and practical issues that have arisen for me (Witthaus, 2020). I end with a call to action by the open education community to add examples to the Wikipedia page on Open Theses (Wikipedia, 2017), in an effort to further disseminate the valuable work being done by researchers in our field.
Belshaw, D. (2012) ‘What is Digital Literacy? A Pragmatic Investigation’. Available at: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/3446/
Belshaw, D. (2014). The essential elements of digital literacies. Available at: https://dougbelshaw.com/essential-elements-book.pdf
Nerantzi, C. (ND) PhD – Chrissi Nerantzi. Available at: https://chrissinerantzi.wordpress.com/phd/
Nerantzi, C. (2017). Towards a framework for crossboundary collaborative open learning for cross-institutional academic development. Available at: https://www.napier.ac.uk/~/media/worktribe/output-1025583/towards-a-framework-for-cross-boundary-collaborative-open-learning-for.pdf
Quent, J. A. (2019) ‘Why I let other people read all of my research notes’, University World News. Available at: https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20190218095959944.
Stewart, B. (2015). Scholarship in Abundance: Influence, Engagement, and Attention in Scholarly Networks. Available at: http://bonstewart.com/Scholarship_in_Abundance.pdf
Stewart, B. (2016) ‘Opening the Dissertation: Why We Need to Make Open the Default | the theoryblog’, the theoryblog, Available at: http://theory.cribchronicles.com/2016/11/02/opening-the-dissertation/ .
Wikipedia:WikiProject Open/Open theses. (2017) In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Open/Open_theses&oldid=763994724
Witthaus, G. (2020). ‘#OpenDissertation 101 – More questions than answers?’ Available at https://artofelearning.org/2020/02/23/opendissertation-101-more-questions-than-answers/
Witthaus, G. (2021). ‘#OpenDissertation:Refugees and asylum seekers in online higher education – engagement, wellbeing and agency’, Available at: https://sites.google.com/artofelearning.org/opendissertation
- open dissertation
- dissemination
- research
