Wiki Symposium

I went to my first ever professional conference. I had been to a luncheon before, but never a full blown international event. It was just good luck that the first ever wiki symposium would be in my own back yard. I took the morning off of work drove down, parked at the mall, and walked right into the convention center. I wedged myself between an Irish guy and a Chinese girl studying in Alabama and listened to a talk on creativity. I didn't enjoy the first speaker, so I worked on my own upcoming wiki presentation at the CUE conference. The second session was the reason I was there. The wiki symposium had Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki, speaking on Monday, but I had to take my car into the shop or I would've gone. The other highlight was Jimmy Ward, (above) the creator of wikipedia. I was hoping he would talk more about his wikibooks project, but enjoyed hearing more about the free content movement and wikipedia. His wikipedia has functioned almost completely for free and this radical shift in thinking has surpassed the market share of commercial encyclopedias like Encarta and Brittanica. Imagine if we had free textbooks, and a free curriculum for all kids K-University... That's one of the things he talked about in his 10 Things that Will Be Free in the future. Open sharing of information has power over our old paradigms of thinking. Who is the mainstream media, when wikipedia reaches more people than The NY Times, The LA Times, The Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC combined?