Programs

Open Knowledge

Covering books, information, news, and education, our websites are pioneering projects in open knowledge, based on the premise that knowledge should be participatory and creativity shared for the benefit of all. They are licensed under Creative Commons and GFDL, allowing Filipinos to use, match, remix, and redistribute the knowledge contained in our websites in any form. Our vision is to create free and open repositories of learning—the Philippine knowledge space—on the Internet.

Filipiniana.net is a digital library and institutional repository. In partnership with academic, government, and research institutions, Filipiniana.net now contains one of the widest and most comprehensive collections of Philippine books and documents spanning a range of subjects: history, science, politics, culture, government, and literature. The website also contains non-textual materials such as photographs, maps, paintings and illustrations.

Powered by Mediawiki technology, WikiPilipinas is an online, free content encyclopedia on the Philippines featuring comprehensive and informative entries on history, culture, sports, politics, entertainment, and other knowledge areas. Its aim is to be the best resource for information on the Philippines on the internet.

The Philippine Online Chronicles (POC) is both a media network and news aggregator, a platform for alternative viewpoints and a synthesizer of ideas. Instead of the traditional journalistic practice of straightforward reportage, POC presents a multiplicity of perspectives in a single article. It reports facts of the news as well as viewpoints on the news. POC does not confine itself to mainstream news sources but actively cultivates less heard voices like blogs, student newspapers, and other alternative publications.

E-Turo is a free e-learning portal where Filipino teachers and learners can interact for effective teaching and learning. E-Turo contains a large archive of educational materials that users can download, share, modify, and print. It addresses basic, alternative, and continuing education.

Literacy

We are dedicated to encouraging Filipinos of all ages to enjoy books. The written word permeates all our activities and helps us to fulfill our vision of inspiring a lifelong love of books for all. Books and narrative — such as storytelling and writing through the web — can entertain and make us laugh, inform and satisfy our curiosity , or provide escape into the imaginative world.

At Vibal Foundation, we recognize that rapid changes in technology are impacting on the way books are produced and bought. We want to ensure that no one is left behind and everyone has access to and choices about which books they read, and the confidence to appreciate and enjoy them.

We want to make a national impact encouraging positive attitudes to books, reading for pleasure and family reading, by providing book gifts for children, resources and targeted campaigns. In this way, we ensure that every child and adult has the opportunity to experience the delight and power of books and the written word, regardless of income, language, literacy skills, disability or culture.

Booklat aims to promote the pleasure of books and encourage parents and carers to read aloud with their children. Scheduled for a pilot launch in July 2011 for National Children’s Book Day, Booklat aims to deliver free book packs to children all over the Philippines in partnership with other publishers, businesses, and non-profits. The Booklat pack will contain a free book, activity sheets, together with a booklet for parents and carers on the value of shared reading and a guide to the best Philippine children’s books.

Nagbabasa Ka Ba? is a biannual reading campaign that encourages Filipinos to make more time for books in their everyday lives. The 2011 campaign will kick off on April 23 (World Book Day) and continue until 23 April of the following year. It will include a symposium on the future of the book, community reading challenges and programs promoting books by Filipino authors, and book gifting schemes.

Preservation

The arts are an essential component of a healthy and democratic society, contributing to the intellectual capital and economic vitality of our communities as well as our understanding of human experience.

Vibal Foundation works to strengthen historical and cultural awareness to enable Filipinos to express cultural values and perspectives more powerfully in a globalized world.

We support projects that foster the creation and sharing of the arts as well as the documentation, preservation, and revitalization of traditional creative forms. With our growing collection of Philippine books and artifacts, we are also positioned to document, analyze, and present Philippine history, art and culture to a modern and wired readership.

Through its publishing division, the Foundation produces books that are of the highest quality in terms of scholarship, content, and design. These books gather the knowledge of foremost experts on Philippine art, culture and history, and showcase the life and work of contemporary artists in various media. Vibal Foundation also reissues invaluable out-of-print classics in updated and attractive editions. In this way, the Foundation aims to create a broad audience for Philippine studies and a deeper appreciation of what the Filipino is capable of.

Our books will also be accessible in multiformat product releases as we create new ways to access and use our content, actively promoting a range of titles in ebook format available on digital readers and mobile Internet devices.

Audio Filipino is a comprehensive collection of audio recordings documenting the Filipino experience. The collection includes thousands of recordings from every region and every genre of spoken word and music: songs, speeches, tales, biographical narrative, radio broadcasts, poetry, epic, folklore—providing a documentary aural history of the Philippines from the early twentieth century to the present. The collection is accompanied by the written and photographic documentation that goes with the recordings.

Museo-Aklatan ng Impreso at Awit (MAIA) is envisioned to be the first library and museum of popular culture in the Philippines. While it will contain a major selection of rare Filipiniana, MAIA’s key collections will include komiks, novels written in different Philippine vernacular languages, audio recordings, and other artifacts of Philippine popular culture, music, literature, and art.

Local Arts and History Initiative (LAHI) is premised on the belief that local people are well qualified to identify the heritage of their local area and determine what is valuable to them. Experts can advise on what is of historic and cultural importance and assist in sourcing information and providing technical advice, but local communities are in a position to make decisions about what is of local significance and how it could be safeguarded in the future. LAHI aims to take a holistic view to encourage a convergence of nature and culture, people and place, and of the past and future.

Arts Education. The Foundation sponsors workshops and symposia in museums and schools to encourage the appreciation and understanding of Philippine art, and its history, context, and meaning, in conjunction with the publication of our Arte Filipino books.

Classroom Support

Vibal Foundation helps schools, teachers, and academic leaders do all they can to help students succeed. Together with corporate, non-profit, and academic partners, we deliver innovative, scalable learning programs to schools, with special focus on digital literacy and new media; provide academic awards, training, and professional support to teachers; and support leadership initiatives that establish and document best practices for students and educators.

CyberSmart provides digital media-focused educational development seminars and workshops for students to address the effective integration of digital media and learning in the classroom.

Through our WikiKaravan workshops and POC and Filnet primers and internships, CyberSmart programs give learners access to state-of-the-art digital hardware and the word processing, digital imaging, and multimedia authoring software that goes with it. Learners gather information from a variety of sources, and synthesize, analyze, and derive knowledge from what they’ve learned. They create their own digital projects and presentations to share what they know.

These activities each encourage collaboration, reflection, and revision; and in the end, students demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge by how well they communicate it. Completed student projects are presented digitally—sometimes on the web, sometimes stored on disc or broadcast via mobile phone technologies—for review by web audiences.

Teacher Trainings. Our teacher training seminars and workshops help teachers integrate technology as a regular and constant element of their teaching and classroom life. We assemble educational technology experts to give hands-on training to teachers and introduce them to web tools with educational applications—such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts—enabling them to contribute content easily to the Internet and communicate with others.

Media Innovation

We advance journalism in the digital age and focus on projects that promote informed, engaged communities and lead to transformational change. We believe that information is a core community need and that technology can strengthen community information, and through that information, communities themselves. We want to ensure that all Filipinos get the information they need to thrive in a democracy and act in their own best interest.

Through flagship new media projects like POC, we serve as an incubator for innovative news experiments that use new technologies to help people actively engage in critical public issues.

We partner with those who choose to lead great journalism into this new century. We hope to help speed the news community’s digital transformation; raise citizen awareness of the value of free expression; help people in all communities get the news they need; and teach and train the journalists of both today and tomorrow.

New Media. Through our new media center, the Foundation is dedicated to helping good journalists and good journalism succeed in the twenty-first century by providing training for new media at all levels: from the traditional journalist making the transition to new media to the new media journalist seeking to improve critical thinking and reporting skills to the newsroom leader managing change in a dynamic era.

The center will provide journalists with multimedia storytelling training; editors and reporters with special technology training; and leadership seminars for editors and online managers from leading news organizations to help them transform their newsrooms; seminars for portal editors and online journalists.

Community Journalism. We help newsrooms and citizens use emerging technologies to better cover and engage their entire community. We believe that citizens can learn to use digital media in ways that enrich community, enhance public discourse, and enliven democracy as we know it. We spotlight dynamic news experiences and help develop interactive news ideas that not only educate people about public affairs but also invite their participation.

POC’s UMedia is an online platform for citizen journalists to post news, videos, photographs, and commentaries on both national and local events. It is also envisioned as a network that guides both ordinary citizens and traditional journalists in launching and responsibly operating community news and information sites. Through on-site support, it seeks to help build capacity for citizens who want to start their own news ventures and to open the doors to citizen participation for traditional news organizations seeking to embrace user-generated content.

Above all it seeks to impart an understanding of the qualities that make for responsible and credible journalism. UMedia will offer numerous learning modules with guidance on how to populate citizen news sites with content, how to use databases and new technology to jumpstart reporting, and how to train citizen journalists. It will provide a unique database of known citizen media sites, searchable by town and other criteria. It will also undertake and spotlight current research on citizen media trends.

Training and Education. The Foundation is partnering with DepEd and private and public schools all over the country to teach the next generation of journalists, increase student media and improve news literacy in the classroom.

POC Youth will play a leading role. It will offer lesson plans, advice from professionals, a free web-hosting service for high school newspapers available to Philippine schools, a free news service, a partnership program for daily newspapers and individual high schools or school districts and a national ad network that connects media experts to hard-to-reach young people.

Community Development

Vibal Foundation helps local partners deliver education-focused programs and support outside the classroom. We work together with leading non-profit organizations to provide locally managed educational support for young people and adults in communities around the Philippines.

Our community focused projects include:

Gawad Kalinga. We provide support for Gawad Kalinga communities by donating books, holding CyberSmart seminars and workshops on new media, writing, and literacy. We are also partnering with corporate sponsors and other non-profits to publish children’s books promoting GK values, hold workshops on writing and new media for GK communities, and set up GK community libraries.

Scholarships. Each year the Foundation makes scholarship grants to disadvantaged students in neighbouring communities. It also participates in outreach and community feeding programs in partnership with other civic organizations.