 Hi, and welcome to Gusta. And it's your Gusta master here, Tom Barley. So, we're all ready. I'm so delighted here. We have Gabby, who's standing here a little bit nervously. So don't forget to count Oskai again. In ursh, are we ready? Ah, hey, I jumped in. Ah, hey, I jumped in, I jumped in, I jumped in, I jumped in, I jumped in, I jumped in, I jumped in, I jumped in, I jumped in, I jumped in, I jumped in, Gusta! Tom! Thank you. Hello, I'm Gabby Whithass. I'm a learning designer and a PhD student. Thank you for joining me on this short reflective pit stop on my open dissertation journey. My PhD thesis is on refugees and asylum seekers and their engagement in online higher education, including aspects of well-being and agency. I have set up this Google site where I'm sharing my work in progress openly chapter by chapter, and here's the link. I'm doing this because I want to share my research with the community of interested scholars and practitioners and refugees themselves in an ongoing way. I believe in the power of networking openly. I can learn from the feedback I get from the community as I go along, and hopefully others can benefit from my work too. As my study is concerned with widening participation in higher education and including marginalized groups, it is also important to me to share the research with people who don't have access to pay-walled journal databases. So this slide shows you the back end of my Google site where the content creation happens. This platform works well for me because I'm drafting my thesis in Google Docs. The section on the right of the slide shows how I can add content from my Google Drive. And this is what the home page of my dissertation looks like to a viewer. It might look a bit blurry, but that's because I zoomed out to give you a fuller view. In the top section, you can see I have embedded my blog, artofellearning.org, and set it to show the posts that I have tagged my PhD. Below that, I have embedded docs from my Google Drive containing chapters, reference lists, and so on. Any time I update a doc in Google Drive, it also updates on the dissertation site. There have been ongoing ethical and practical questions to resolve. I discussed some of these in a 2020 blog post. So for now, I will just focus on the question of when to share. The least radical option is at the right end of the spectrum. And that would be to wait until I've completed the thesis. But then, of course, I would lose those key benefits of rapid dissemination and ongoing networking. On the other hand, the most extreme version of openness would involve me sharing all my Google Docs from the moment I create them. On the left hand, end of the spectrum. And that would enable viewers to watch as my words splutter onto the screen, partly in an effort to protect people from this, but also to lay my own anxieties about such exposure. I have gone for somewhere in the middle of a continuum. So writing a dissertation in the open is not a novel endeavor. I am privileged to be standing on the shoulders of giants here, too many to mention in this talk. But I would like to give a shout out to three scholars who have inspired me. The first is Doug Belshall, whose open thesis on digital literacy has been accessed almost a million times and who subsequently developed his thesis into an open access book. The second is Bonnie Stewart, whose thesis on scholarship in a time of knowledge abundance concluded that, quote, networked scholarly practices of engagement align broadly with those of academia, yet enable and demand scholars individual cultivation of influence, visibility, and audiences, end quote. That's from the abstract of her thesis. This is very much the underpinning philosophy of my own open research practice. Thirdly, we have Chrissy Naranzee, whose thesis culminated in an openly licensed cross boundary collaborative open learning framework for cross institutional academic development. Chrissy generously shared her processes and tips along the way for other PhD students to benefit from. Thank you to these colleagues and to all those who I wasn't able to mention here for their inspirational examples. I am honored to be following in your footsteps. To end with, I have a call to action. The Wikipedia page on open theses is out of date and the lists it contains of open theses in various stages of development are much too short to be a true reflection of reality. Please help me update this page. Finally, I would like to thank GoGN for sponsoring my participation at OER 21 and Lancaster University, especially my supervisor, Kyung Mi Lee, for all the support and encouragement. Here are the references and thank you for watching. I hope you'll join me along the remainder of my open theses journey. Nom, nom, nom.