Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This is a really bad article about a really interesting topic. The Ikhwân al-Safâ' is a set of notes - an introductory encyclopedia, really - on science and medicine authored and distributed in the tenth century CE. "It consists of extremely heterogeneous materials, reworked to represent the whole educational training intended for an élite," writes Wolfgang Schwarz in his summary, and so you can see how this would be one of the earliest examples of distance education. I'm rather less than enthusiatic about the Stanford Encyclopedia article because it takes a long time to get around to even telling readers what the Ikhwân al-Safâ' is and what it contains, first spending eleven long paragraphs discussing disputes about authorship and another section in deep discussion about its ideological commitments. I recommend starting in section 4 and then jumping to section 6 and only then (if you're truly interested) reading the author's vast redactive scholarship. Image: Orientalia.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Mar 28, 2024 05:08 a.m.

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