Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a…

This article explores different forms of openness and closure in two knowledge communities: the fictional world of Castalia in Hermann Hesse's great work "The Glass Bead Game", and the twenty-first-century cyberspatial universe of Wikipedia. These two worlds differ in some important respects, but they also share a number of educationally…