Missing Women, eSports, Virtual Schools, Story Obsession

Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Guest: Kathryn Blaze Baum, National Reporter for The Globe and Mail Newspaper The official count from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is that some 1,200 indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered during the past 30 years, but the actual number could be closer to 4,000 according to research by the Native Women’s Association of Canada. Many of the women vanished along a remote roadway in British Columbia that’s become known as the Highway of Tears. Canada’s prime minister has now launched a national inquiry into the disappearances and murders of indigenous women.  E-sports Athletes Guest: Claire Schaeperkoetter, Doctoral Student at the University of Kansas Last year, the University of California, Irvine built a state-of-the-art arena with high-end computers to host big video gaming competitions. They added a stage and studio webcasting games live. And they offered 10 academic scholarships for students who will join the team. Let me repeat that – a major public research university is now offering scholarships to students for doing the very thing so many parents consider a colossal waste of time.  Now get this – there are five universities in the country who offer scholarships to gamers as athletes. Not academic scholarships like at UC Irvine. We’re talking athletic scholarships – like you could be recruited to the football team, or you could come play for the school’s e-sports team.  Virtual Blended Schools Guest: Gary Miron, PhD, Professor of Educational Leadership, Research and Technology at Western Michigan University Education experts have been saying for some time now, that online instruction is the future. Getting to that future has posed some growing pains. The 2016 Virtual Schools Report from the National Education Policy Center shows student performance lags on a number of measures at schools that are entirely online and those that blend virtual and face-to-face instruction.  America’s Obsession with Stories Guest: Qi Wang, PhD, Professor