Alexander Flor

Alexander G. Flor (born 5 July 1953, Manila) is a Filipino academic who has been the , Vice Chancellor of the UP Open University and served two terms as Dean of its Faculty of Information & Communication Studies.
He is known for his transdisciplinary approach to communication and as a pioneer of the Los Baños school of development communication.
Biography
He completed his undergraduate degree at Silliman University and his graduate degrees at the University of the Philippines, with a dissertation on the Two Faces of the Information Age (1986), under the direction of Nora Quebral.
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 became the Vice Chancellor for Research and Development of the UP Open University, then as founding Dean of the University's Faculty of Information & Communication Studies.
Academic work
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; for co-authoring the Transformational Communication Model (1997) along with Rebecca Smith; 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).
Publications
*Broadcast Based Distance Learning Systems (University of the Philippines Press, 1995) and
* Introduction to Development Communication, co-written with Ila Virginia C. Ongkiko, the textbook used for development communication students' introductory courses in the Philippines.
*eDevelopment and Knowledge Management](2001); Ethnovideography(2002);
* Digital Tools for Process Documentation](2002) .
*Environmental Communication (2004)
* Developing Societies in the Information Age

Flor is credited for coining the term “ethnovideography” in 1992 and its conceptualization as a methodology for studying groups or sub-groups using small format video.” He is recognized within the Philippine KM community as having started the Los Baños school of knowledge management, which he describes in his book (2007) as “indifferent to corporate values, founded on knowledge science, guided by knowledge economics, and contributory to the Millennium Development Goals.”
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.
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: "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' "

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu