One Person’s Path to Quest Atlantis
Community News/QVille
To start with, let me explain just who I am and what I do at Quest Atlantis. I (Scott Miller…aka Enkar in QA) am a retired Tier-2 Technical Manager at AT&T. “Tier-2” means I provided technical support to the top-craft technicians in the field.
Since 1998 I have been involved with the online 3D Virtual Reality universe at Active Worlds, concentrating on the 3D world building aspect of that community but also building fine relationships with many users all over the world as well. For the seven years prior to my hiring at QA in 2005, this was a wonderfully fun and stimulating hobby for me and I never once realistically thought I could ever have a paying job doing it. Then, as I was making my final plans to retire at AT&T in January of 2005, I decided to look around for something to occupy my time. Through a serendipitous referral at an old, abandoned grad student 3D universe at Indiana University, I was put into contact with Sasha Barab at Quest Atlantis. A quick trip to Bloomington to show him my work online resulted in my job at QA.
Now I administer Quest Atlantis’ network of 3D worlds and provide local technical support and do R/D research for future versions of the software. I also manage QA’s Quester building world, QVille on a daily basis and field help questions from all of our young builders who acquire building lots there. How could it get better than that for an old, retired guy getting paid to play in his favorite hobby?
Over the years I’ve seen many interesting things happen in QVille world. Although the vast majority of Quester builders build quaint, cute builds on their lots, every so often a few come along that show immense promise. When that happens, I looked at the possibility of maybe retaining those students whose parents don’t mind them staying around in QA to help me out with future mission world building projects. Today, I have two very experienced and mature teen interns who help me build new worlds in QA. These two boys also work with me in my own personal 3D worlds online and are having a ball! One of them has even taken to using Truespace to create new and unique 3D objects for our use! It’s my hope that while my experience landed me a job working for an interesting project, that these experiences will also help these two young men use their skills in their career paths down the road.
~Enkar
Yes, Scott, I have found the work you are doing in Qville absolutely transformative for those kids. In fact, in spite of all the countless hours we put into other designs for the kids to support collaboration and such, it is often QVILLE where we see the rich collaborations and powerful contributions. In fact, one of Linda Polin’s doctoral students did her dissertation comparing the chat in QVILLE with chat in one of our science worlds. Heidi found that in total there was something like 20 pages of text over the week in the science world, and over 200 pages in Qville. Further, she found that when she coded for collaborative problem solving, something like 80% of the chat was of this collaborative participation in the student-owned Qville while most of the chat in the we-produced and teacher-assigned science world was social—kind of humbling.
Anyway, I have found those children whom you have mentored to be so helpful to others. The transition from their earlier work in which they were insecure and felt they had little to offer to two years later when they thought they were the bees knees and they really did have tons to offer. I appreciate your dedication and time to help bring out the such deep personal change for these kids.