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The purpose of this paper is to posit that coding should be considered as a critical part of new literacies. Teacher educators should first adopt the new literacies perspective, and then prepare pre-service teachers to teach both traditional literacy and new literacies skills, especially preparing them how to weave coding into K-5 literacy curricula to cultivate younger learners’ new ways of expressions and computational thinking skills. To facilitate this educational transformation, low-cost Web 2.0 tools and apps were introduced as one practical approach, along with some literacy lesson ideas to help teacher educators and pre-service teachers begin to integrate coding into the K-5 literacy curricula.

This paper is a viewpoint paper.

A table of low-cost Web 2.0 tools was presented with sample lesson ideas.

More than ever, coding breaks the traditional definition of literacy as paper-based reading and writing. It empowers students to read, write and create with multimodality on multiple platforms. Weaving coding into the literacy curricula offers the window to promote both computational thinking and new literacies skills. Teacher educators, among all other stakeholders, should begin the efforts to prepare pre-service teachers to weave coding into the literacy curricula and other content areas in the teacher educations programs now.

The existing mashup literature paid little attention to the actual adoption and diffusion of mashups in an organizational context. As more and more organizations are engaged in mashup initiatives, more research efforts focussing on the mashup use and adoption issues from the organizational perspective are needed to ensure that organizations can receive the maximum benefits from their mashup initiatives. Two studies are conducted to increase the understanding of the use and adoption issues with social media mashups. The paper aims at discussing these issues.

The paper first used a text mining approach to analyze relevant posts on blogs and messages in a major online mashup forum in order to understand the current status of social media mashup as well as representative themes and issues with social media mashups in general. Subsequently, the paper reviewed a number of social media mashup sites created by higher education institutions (HEIs) in the USA.

The paper identified some representative themes and issues with social media mashups in general. The paper also identified the approaches that were used to design the interface of social media mashup sites by HEIs. Based on the two studies, this paper provides recommendations and insights to guide social media mashup development and adoption in an organizational context.

This is the first article to discuss the use and adoption of social media mashups in organizational environments. This paper can be used as a starting point to motivate other researchers to further explore the diffusion of social media mashups in different industries. This paper also helps organizations improve their social media mashup initiatives.

Even though social media are nowadays used in the frame of public governance to ensure citizens’ major participation, enhance e-dialogue and e-democracy consequently, this utilization has not been expanded yet in the field of education, whose key role focuses on the cultivation of active citizenship, as it is promoted through participation. The purpose of this paper is to examine leadership’s views of Greek Secondary and Tertiary Education on the potential use of social media for participatory decision-making processes in order to identify if the e-participation model could be implemented in the Greek education field as in other public domains.

An exploratory research was elaborated, employing a survey design of quantitative method in order to explore Greek educational organizations leadership’s perspectives toward social media usage in participatory decision-making processes.

The research reveals Greek educational leadership’s positive view on the potential effects of social media usage in participatory decision-making processes and highlights anticipated benefits as well as problems to be faced, indicating the foundation for Greek leaders to implement social media in their leadership practices and exploit their affordances as in e-governance shifts.

Bringing the concept of e-participation and crowd sourcing model – key features in e-governance initiatives through social media usage – in education field, Greek educational leadership is informed to consider social media utilization more methodically in the context of participatory decision-making processes, updating simultaneously existing leadership practices.

Up till now, social media usage in participatory decision-making processes in educational settings has hardly received attention.