Projects

I have been involved in a number of projects as part of my work at UPOU. Below is a list of some that I have had the privilege to either lead or participate in.

UPOU Community Site (2008-2011)

This was a pet project which I planned at the start of my career in UPOU. It is supposed to be a content-driven website ideally comprising of faculty, staff, students and alumni posting articles and blogs whose topics, as well as participating in an online forum whose topics don’t exactly fit in the official UPOU website and MOODLE. Since the middle of 2008, the community site has attained a certain degree of success in reaching out to several students. It has become a springboard for extra-curricular discussion and activities which are severely lacking in UPOU. The augmentation of the website with social networking tools have further boosted site traffic and has reached more members of the UPOU community than any other online community prior to Facebook.

Unfortunately, the site closed in 2011 as the core group in the community moved on. This highlighted the problem of sustainability. This is perhaps the biggest issue in establishing a viable online community within the university.

Land Valuation and Management Program Development (2009-2012)

As part of the government's LAMP2 program under the Department of Finance, I was a part of the team responsible for developing the Diploma and Master in Land Valuation and Management programs currently offered by the Faculty of Management and Development Studies (FMDS) in UPOU.

I performed multiple tasks in this team. But my main contribution was the content for what would eventually be LVM 202. After writing the course manual, I proceeded with teaching it three times.

Biomodd (2009-present)

Biomodd is a collaborative art project conceived to challenge presumed notions of opposition between nature and technology in different cultures throughout the world. The project started in 2007 during a residency of Angelo Vermeulen at The Aesthetic Technologies Lab in Athens, Ohio. Since then multiple versions have been built both by the people that originally came up with the idea, and by other communities throughout the world. Biomodd art works have been created and showcased in America, the Asia Pacific, and Europe. I have so far been directly involved in four Biomodd-related projects. Out of the three, I was able to lead [C]Biomodd in 2010, which was meant to create a piece that commemorated the work done for Biomodd[LBA2] in 2009. These led to more collaboration as an invited participant in Delft, Netherlands in 2011 and Taichung, Taiwan in 2016.

UPOU ePortfolios (2014-present)

Over the years, electronic portfolios have been studied and used extensively by institutions of higher education for the benefits they bring on multiple fronts. An ePorftolio is a powerful tool for assessment and reflection for students and faculty alike. But unlike other assessment tools and methods that are confined within a single course, provided with an appropriate system, an ePortfolio is able to help facilitate an integrated academic program-level assessment of students. It also becomes an avenue for which content can be showcased at the individual or institutional level to the public.

UPOU ePortfolios is a project that has the potential to bring about major change not just in BAMS, but how all courses are handled at UPOU.

The UPOU Digital Collective (2015-present)

The UPOU Digital Collective is an initiative to produce high quality digital content for the benefit of UPOU students and teachers alike. But what sets this apart from all other university projects I know of is that the people who need these resources and the ones who are meant to use them all belong to the same group. Content is created by UPOU for UPOU.

We intend to achieve the above goal through class-sourcing, or crowdsourcing within the confines of a class, or in this case, university. In a nutshell, this is how it will work:

1. Generate content and make available not just the final output or product, but also the building blocks of the product and an account of how the content was produced.
2. Make content available as an open educational resource under a Creative Commons license.
3. Compel consumers of the content to become producers themselves. This will enable the creation of new content and evolve existing ones.