A fun first day with #OpenTeachingOU hashtag

Hashtags are one of my favorite things about Twitter. They are great for indexing AND great for connecting. I'm not sure if it will be possible to get #OpenTeachingOU to really work for connecting people at OU (there are just not that many OU faculty using social media, alas...), but even if it is not something that takes off in a social sense, I realized yesterday how useful this can be for me simply as an indexing strategy.

#OpenTeachingOU

Here's what I mean by that: as I tagged my own content yesterday and also used #OpenTeachingOU when I retweeted and shared at Twitter and at Google+, I was able to focus more clearly on what part of my content stream is about open teaching. Open teaching is something I care about very much, and it can go in so many different directions: open syllabuses, open educational resources, sharing narratives about our work as teachers, sharing our students' work, and on and on. Connected Courses really affirmed my commitment to open sharing online, so I will be hoping good things for open everything in 2015!

In particular, I'll keep hoping good things for online conversations about teaching at OU in the new year (more about that here in my previous OpenTeachingOU post), and I'll also enjoy having the #OpenTeachingOU hashtag as a way to index my own blogs and tweets and posts.

So, after Day One, here's how it is looking at Twitter: #OpenTeachingOU ... and thanks to the power of Inoreader to turn all kinds of things into a feed, you can see even more via the Inoreader RSS or the HTML display for the tag! I've embedded that HTML view below. Just click on the title of any item, and away you go!

Next: I need to add a Twitter widget for this hashtag to this blog's sidebar. Hashtags! Widgets! RSS! Connect and share everywhere! Yes!!! :-)

(Wikimedia Commons)