Anyone can read our messages to our Yahoo Group.  They are public so that they can be followed in an RSS reader like Google Reader.  This message was posted in response to the one above but then I decided to take the conversation to Posterous as well, so I’m sending it now to multiliteracies@posterous.com/ with an appropriate subject line. If you get a notice of this post in your email, you can just reply to post a comment on the blog.

So, again here, altered slightly … 

I too was getting problems with Posterous last night in updating my blog post on Dave Cormier’s talk.  I was getting timeouts and having to refresh, and simply saving was taking a Very Long Time.  At one point I got the ‘oh noes’ screen.  But I persevered, and eventually everything worked (I just had to let it do its thing, and now, next day, it seems to be working fine):

I’ve never seen the ‘oh noes’ screen before but as it’s reminiscent of the Twitter Fail Whale, you might be interested in this opinion of Twitter’s takeover of Posterous back in March 2012. Some deterioration in Posterous’s services has not gone un-noticed.

Wesley Fryer also notes this deterioration in the post that Vanessa pointed us to

One instance of this deterioration is a glitch (hopefully temporary) with the Sign Up link on the Posterous web site.  So Wes gives a workaround whereby you send email to post@posterous.com.  This is the email address to post to your blog, but if Posterous notices that the sender’s email isn’t registered it creates an acct for them, and starts a blog with the emailed text as the first post.  

The ability to work with Posterous via email has always been one of its more interesting affordances as a convenient-to-use classroom Web 2.0 tool.  Therefore I am encouraging MultiMOOC participants to sign up with http://multiliteracies.posterous.com/ and many have, but not many have been using the blog.

When I notice that someone is following this blog, I set them to be a CONTRIBUTOR.  (This is also the way I use Posterous with my students).

If you are a CONTRIBUTOR you can now use post@posterous.com to send any message you like to the blog and it will become an original post in that blog (but be careful, the subject of the email is the title of the blog post – but again, it can be changed, so don’t stress over it). However, if you already keep blogs at Posterous, this email address might send your post to an existing blog.  You can direct your post to the MultiMOOC blog by using this email address: multiliteracies@posterous.com/

Now, if you’ve read this far, it might have occurred to you that this would be an excellent way for you to DECLARE your intentions in this session.  You could make a post introducing yourself by giving a bit of background about what brought you to this session, and if possible give the URL for the space where you will be posting items relating to this course.  That is one way of declaring, which happens to be the “topic” for this week.

More ways to DECLARE will soon appear here:

But if you’re keen to do something meantime, you could listen to Wes Fryer’s keynote audio for this session, linked here http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/ and tell us if anything there makes particular sense now. One thing that I didn’t know was that you can get Wolfram Alfa to solve complex math equations, so I tested it with my students. I don’t know what their math teachers might think about that, but the students were keenly interested!  But Wolfram Alpha is only an aside. So listen and tell us what you think!