While reflecting on openness in education I came to think of panopticon, a special type of prison building that is used as a metaphor for disciplinary mechanisms ruling modern society. Due to its circular structure with an inspection tower in the middle the prisoners permanently feel themselves being observed. According to Michel Foucault the distribution of power (and knowledge) in a society is very similar to that in a ponopticon: Very few of its members have access to the whole knowledge, which allows them to control and subjugate those with the restricted access. I am afraid, knowledge has always been distributed unevenly and hence it is closely interconnected with power order of a society: The more knowledge you can access, produce and manage, the more powerful you are.

It is for these reasons I found the TED-talk by David Wiley on Open Education and the Future somewhat utopian. I could hardly agree with him claiming that expertise is non-rivalrous and that one can share knowledge without losing it. On the contrary: Experts are rivals on the battlefield of academic impact and acknowledgment. Each of them has to fight for validation and dissemination of the knowledge at his or her command. And each of them has to follow certain discourse rules in order to ensure legitimation and protection of the knowledge he or she produces or acquires. So in today’s world, knowledge has the status of a commodity: It is produced following certain rules like those of citation and academic style, distributed in line with certain quality assurance mechanisms like peer reviewing, consumed by a rather narrow circle of those who are interested, and protected by certain judicial regulations like copyright.

However, there is a hope that the new media and technology will sooner or later force us to rethink our attitude to knowledge. Huge amount of knowledge is already made available in Open Educational Resources repositories and MOOCs, but also on the torrent web-sites whose existence is another good evidence of outdated knowledge policy. Most obviously, all the legal restrictions we are facing now in terms of reusing, redistributing, revising and remixing information online will become obsolete and useless. The change seems to be inevitable. And I believe that the future belongs to those Higher Education Systems that appear resilient enough with regard to new opportunities of knowledge dissemination offered by the digital technologies. As soon as it happens, the knowledge will no longer be used as an instrument of subjugation and control. We will break out of panopticon creating unlimited online space for “the flow of knowledge” over the globe.