Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
I am a Peacekeeper in an online virtual reality universe. We Peacekeepers are a voluntary group of online citizens, who help as we can in the Activeworlds virtual reality community. We help new and regular users who come to Activeworlds. We assist Activeworlds.com personnel, by providing an online presence, for citizens and users to find help and advice. We assist users in disputes and try to prevent harassment of any user by others regardless of the form, be it verbal abuse or harassment, racism or vandalism that are clearly in violation of the published guidelines.
I use Dragon to allow me to handle fast paced chat while keeping my hands free on the keyboard to manipulate software tools and databases that I use to provide information and enforce the peace. I do not type very well and I am famous for reversing the "o" and the "r" in the word "from". Using Dragon eliminated the vast majority of my misspelled words while significantly increasing my capability to respond. it also allows me to provide more detail when explaining a process for offering a suggestion to a new user.
in one incident, I was using conflict resolution skills to resolve a dispute over a segment of virtual land. The claims on both sides were somewhat complex. However, using Dragon, I was able to dictate my thoughts and post them to chat without having to worry about not having enough time to complete the same text typing it manually. As a result I appear to the users to be a competent authority, able to effectively communicate and worthy of respect. Consequently, the land dispute was concluded to the satisfaction of both parties. I credit Dragon for allowing me to organize my thoughts and get them into the chat log and a fast clear and coherent stream.
Additionally, if it is necessary for me to eject a user from the virtual world for violating the guidelines I find that I am able to dictate my report quickly and efficiently often immediately after the event. It has been a big timesaver, added more detail in my report and and significantly increased my capability to serve my user community.
I have been a Dragon user for many years. I use it not only for my work in virtual worlds but also to write reports, letters and to write science fiction.