Information Systems

In June 2017, a story appeared in the Washington Post about a federally funded program in which the digital divide is deeply implicated. In October, 2018, another story appeared which is the most recent update, at the time these instructions are being written, on the same federal program. Copies of both these 2017 and 2018 stories — by Brian Fung — will be placed in the attachments. They should give you some helpful background information on the specific federal program as well as societal reactions to that program. This background material is necessary for you to write your essay, so be sure you have read and understood both stories. For the final essay, here is your task. Write me an essay, minimum 1500 words in length, not counting references. The specific question to focus on in this essay has two parts: Part 1. Presume that the LifeLine Program is continued. How and why might the LifeLine Program potentially close the digital divide? Part 2. Presume that the LifeLine Program is not continued. How and why might this closure have no effect on the digital divide? You must address both parts of that question in your essay. Answering only Part 1 or Part 2 is not enough. This is not a question with a necessarily “Right” or “Wrong” answer; like many real-life questions, it is too complex for that. Rather, what we will be grading you for is your ability to support a well-constructed argument with high-quality, relevant sources of evidence. A rubric showing how the essays will be graded will be placed in the attachments. The essay will be graded by one of two people: the professor or your TA. The professor is asked to resolve dilemmas encountered by the TAs as necessary. Style and content requirements: Please use APA style for your citations. It is not necessary to format the body of the paper using APA style; we do not need to see an abstract; the citations are what we are focusing on. This means using in-text citations using the author/date style, for example (Smith, 2019) when you are citing material in the body of the paper, instead of using footnotes [1]. It also means using APA style for the references at the end of your paper. A minimum of 5 citations to scholarly literature is required for this essay exam [see below for definition of “scholarly”]: Three of the 5 scholarly citations *must* be to readings assigned during any week of this course — anything appearing in the syllabus is considered assigned. These readings will be placed in attachments. The other 2 scholarly citations must be to readings of your choice from “outside” every week of the course–anything NOT appearing in the syllabus is considered non-assigned. The Washington Post articles about LifeLine do not count towards this minimum of 5 citations. (They aren’t scholarly, anyway). Note well: For the purposes of this final exam, “scholarly” is defined this way: * it “has citations” and * it is “not Wikipedia”. A citation is a reference to the source of information used by the author to express their thoughts. In the scholarly materials you find, a citation *may* appear as a footnote, for example [2] and it *may* appear as an in-text citation (Smith, 2019); it depends on the academic field and the style used in that field. If you are unsure whether something is a citation, inspect it to see if you can see a source of information. For example, in footnote 2, below, the source of information is a journal that I made up called “The Journal of Final Exam Writing.” If you can’t see a source of information– it’s probably not a citation!