Alexander Flor

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Alexander G. Flor

Other names Alexander Flor
Occupation academic
Known for contributions to the field of Development Communication

Alexander G. Flor is a Filipino academic best known as a pioneer of the Los Baños school of development communication, contributing to the field's understanding and application of ethnovideography, distance learning, strategic communication, environmental communication, the collective mind, knowledge management and information and communication technologies for development. Flor is currently the Dean of the UP Open University's Faculty of Information & Communication Studies.[1]

Flor is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[2]

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[edit] Family

Flor comes from a family of academics. He is a nephew to writer and National Artist Néstor Vicente Madali González. His first cousins, Dr. Jose G. Mariano and Dr. NIM Gonzalez serves as President, University of Asia and the Pacific and Dean, Asian Institute of Journalism Graduate School, respectively. His wife, Dr. Benjamina Gonzalez-Flor is a grand-niece to Dr. Bienvenido Gonzalez, the first post-war president of the University of the Philippines.[1] On both sides of his family, Flor is a third generation Freemason.

[edit] Academic career

From 1976 to 2000, Flor Served in the faculty of the College of Development Communication of the University of the Philippines Los Baños. In 2002 he was asked to serve as a Vice Chancellor of the UP Open University, staying on until 2004 when a restructuring of the UPOU led him to become the first Dean of the University's Faculty of Information & Communication Studies, arguably the first Asian institution to operationalize the convergence of communication arts and computer science in its curricular offerings.

[edit] Contributions to Development Communication theory

As a theorist, he is credited with the cybernetic definition of development communication rooted in D. Lawrence Kincaid's convergence model of communication; for being one of the earliest proponents of upstream and downstream DevCom interventions; and for proposing development communication as a Fifth Theory of the Press (after the Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility and Soviet Communist theories proposed by Siebert et al. in 1956).[3]

Among his notable contributions to the field as an author include Broadcast Based Distance Learning Systems (University of the Philippines Press, 1995) and Introduction to Development Communication, which he co-wrote with Ila Virginia C. Ongkiko - the textbook used for development communication students' introductory courses in the Philippines.[4] A student of Nora Quebral, he began relating development communication to the newly emerging ICTs in the early eighties. Flor differed from his mentor in the sense that he adopted a critical perspective. His dissertation on the Two Faces of the Information Age (1986) was indicative of this. Published early in his career were articles on the Information Wastage Ratio (Scientometrics,1987) and the Informatization of Agriculture (Asian Journal of Communication,1994.) This, however, changed drastically while serving as Knowledge Management Program Officer of SEAMEO SEARCA, an intergovernmental organization of the ten Southeast Asian countries which pioneered in the area of agricultural knowledge resources and systems. In 2001, he presented a seminal paper on ICT4D at the Asian Development Forum III in Bangkok. The paper, ICT and Poverty the Indisputable Link, gave five major perspectives on the causes of poverty and how they relate to information and communication. This was followed by an online paper presentation on A Global Knowledge Network(2001) and a paper on Social Capital and the Network Effect(2004) presented in Bali.

Flor has three books published by SEARCA: eDevelopment and Knowledge Management(2001); Ethnovideography(2002); and Digital Tools for Process Documentation(2002) . While at UPOU he wrote Environmental Communication (2004) which he started with the declarative statement, “Environmentalism as we know it today began with environmental communication. The environmental movement was ignited by a spark from a writer’s pen, or more accurately, Rachel Carson’s typewriter.”[5]

Flor is also credited for coining the term “ethnovideography” in 1992 and its conceptualization as a methodology for studying groups or sub-groups using small format video.”[6] It may be noted that most YouTube documentaries inadvertently use production technique akin to ethnovideography. Additionally, Flor is recognized within the Philippine KM community as having started the Los Baños school of knowledge management, which he describes in his book Development Communication Praxis (2007) as “indifferent to corporate values, founded on knowledge science, guided by knowledge economics, and contributory to the Millennium Development Goals.”[7] In 1998, while concurrently serving in SEARCA, he introduced knowledge management into the Bachelor of Science in Development Communication curriculum of the University of the Philippines Los Baños.

[edit] Development Communication: a cybernetic definition

In 1993, as part of the then Institute of Development Communication's Faculty papers series, Flor wrote a paper on environmental communication that, among other things, proposed a definition of Development Communication expanded from Norbert Weiner's concept of negentropy under cybernetics and general systems theory[3]:

If information counters entropy and societal breakdown is a type of entropy, then there must be a specific type of information that counters societal entropy. The exchange of such information - be it at the individual, group, or societal level - is called development communication.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Alexander G. Flor, Ph.D.:Academic, Author, & Consultant on ICT4D and KM4D, <http://agflor.net/>. Retrieved on 14 February 2008 
  2. ^ Flor, Alexander, Malcolm Hazelman, and Scott MacLean (Principal Investigators) (August 30, 2006), [http://www.upou.org/research/povertyreduction.pdf Odl for Agricultural Development and Rural Poverty Reduction: A Comparative Analysis of Innovation and Best Practice in Asia and the Pacific, p.29], <http://www.upou.org/research/povertyreduction.pdf>. Retrieved on 7 May 2008 
  3. ^ a b Flor, Alexander (1993). "Upstream and Downstream Interventions in Environmental Communication" (Monograph). . Institute of Development Communication
  4. ^ Ongkiko, Ila Virginia & Flor, Alexander (1998), Introduction to Development Communication (Second Printing ed.), Quezon City: University of the Philippines Open University (published 2006), ISBN 971-560-096-4 
  5. ^ Flor, Alexander, Environmental Communication (First Printing ed.), Quezon City: University of the Philippines Open University (published 2004) 
  6. ^ Flor, Alexander, Ethnovideography: Video-based Indigenous Knowledge Systems (First Printing ed.), Los Baños, Laguna: SEAMEO SEARCA (published 2002), ISBN 971-560-069-7 
  7. ^ Flor, Alexander, Development Communication Praxis (First Printing ed.), Quezon City: University of the Philippines Open University (published 2007), ISBN 978-971-767-200-7