Lesson III

Exercise 1. These words you should know.

to sack - увольнять с работы complaint - жалоба

flight attendant - стюардесса, бортпроводница

grievance - недовольство

READ AND TRANSLATE THE TEXT

Bloggers and the company

An employee who has been blogging for 12 years has just been sacked by a Waterstone’s bookstore in Edinburgh, Scotland for criticising his employer. In his weblog, or blog, he wrote negatively about his boss. This has started a discussion about the rights of individual free speech. In another case in the USA last November, a flight attendant calling herself Queen of the Sky was fired over a photograph of herself, which appeared on her blog, where she wore her Delta Airlines uniform. She is filing a discrimination complaint.

There are more than 5 million blogs or online diaries, and the number is growing. In 2003, Blogger, one of the first companies to produce easy to use blogging software, was bought by Google, the leading web search company. The word entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year. A recent US poll reported that 32 million people say they read blogs, and 7 per cent of Internet users in the US write blogs. People blog for many reasons. An ambulance driver in London writes a blog about his work, because he thought people would be interested in what happens in an ambulance. It gets about 4,000 hits a day. His blog is anonymous. Many people use their blog to complain about life at work. This can create problems for companies. Unhappy employees can now share their complaints with millions across the Internet.

This is such a new phenomenon that employee codes of conduct are not particularly clear about blogs. What happens if bloggers use company equipment and time? ‘Perhaps blogs can be good for companies’ suggested one manager. ‘They can respond sensitively to employee grievances.’ One thing seems sure; companies now need to accept that the world is moving on and make guidelines which take into consideration this ever more popular practice.

ASWER THE QUESTIONS: 1. Should people be fired for writing negative things about their employer or company online? 2. Should employees have the right to use the Internet at work for private purposes? 3. Do you think that companies need to clarify what employees can and cannot write in a “blog”? 4. How can companies use “blogs” to their advantage? 5. Do you have your own blog or personal web-page? 6. What do you think about Facebook or Twitter? 7. Do you have your personal page in any social networking?

Exercises

Exercise 1. Choose the correct verb form from the given into the brackets.

Free wi-fi

Norwich: a giant ‘hot spot’. Norwich is in the news. The city in the east of England has ______ (began, begun, begin) a project, which offers free wi-fi to the public. The pilot project will cost over £1 million, and is _____ (intending, intend, intended) to last for 18 months. The technology_____ (involves, involved, involve) placing 200 antennas around the city, mainly on lampposts. This creates blanket wi-fi coverage. It means you can get an Internet connection as you _____ (walking, walked, walk) through the city streets! It has effectively _____ (made, makes, making) the city into a giant hot spot. There ___ (are, were, will be) 1,800 connections in the first week. This figure rose to over 2,500 in the second and 3,000 in the third week.

The experiment follows on from developments in the US where Google has _____ (enabling, enabled, enable) blanket wi-fi coverage in Mountain View. Other places in the States are _____ (done, did, doing) the same. Phone calls over a wi-fi connection ____ (don’t use, doesn’t use, didn’t use) the mobile phone network, so free wi-fi has the potential to reduce expensive phone calls. However, user reports ______ (suggests, suggested, suggest) that free wi-fi is not as reliable as a home Internet connection.

Over in Norwich, very few technical problems have ____ (be reported, been reported, reported). Although connection speeds are not as fast as broadband at home, public-service workers ____ (is, are, were) speaking out about the benefits. For example, they do not have to go back to the offices in order to access information systems. Engineers and other workers in the field can place orders online. While this kind of communication is usually ____ (done, doing, do) via mobile phones, some workers feel that using a PDA can be more useful and efficient. However, the wi-fi network is ____ (unsecured, unsecuring, unsecure), so it is not advisable to send sensitive information.

Previous to this pilot project, the only way to get Internet on the move ___ (is, was, were) to connect at a limited number of hot spots such as those found in airport lounges and Internet cafés. The cost of connecting in this way can be relatively high. The pilot system is not in competition with commercial companies, such as T-Mobile. One key question remains: will ‘free’ wi-fi stay free forever?

Exercise 2. Read the dialogue.

Ed: OK John. What do you think of their pitch (предложение)?

John: Well Ed, they want to sell us ‘coaching by text messaging’. I think it’ll be popular with the sales team – they travel a lot. All the guys in the field have PDAs or palms and are always using their mobiles. The idea is ‘anywhere, anytime’ learning – nothing new there. Er, I think it’s called ‘M-learning’. The training organisation sends a text each morning with a task.

Ed: Learning by doing? Angela, do you want to come in here?

Angela: Well, it sounds a bit – er, superficial. I mean, what can you really learn like this? Nothing deep or complex, I’m sure.

Ed: Fair point. So, why not go ahead and tell us about the Web training people’s visit?

Angela: Well, this seems quite exciting. They organise virtual seminars – it could be a great cost saver – we employ fewer trainers!

John: Yeah, but don’t people then miss the social side of training. I enjoy our seminars … and they’re good for morale!

Angela: “But they’re so expensive – and people aren’t at their desks. Anyway, these guys offer webcasts as well – and you can store them on the server.

John: Yeah, that’s good if you miss the webcast.

Angela: I think they call it online streaming or something. It’ll work for a lot of our training courses – you know, finance, IT … oh, and the marketing course. They want to create the content for us and store it in a CMS. That will give employees access to training 24/7.

John: It just won’t work with the language training. I tried two years ago to move it all online but the staff didn’t want it. They liked the face to face aspect. Look Angela, we never seem to get anywhere on this – maybe we should take a look at blended (смешанный) learning courses for language learning at least?

Ed: OK, let’s wind this up. We’ve got some hard choices. I mean, do we pay someone to write the content for a web platform? And what about quality issues? How do we know if the training is going to be effective? Let’s do a cost benefit analysis for our various options. I think e-learning could be a way forward, but I don’t want us to end up losing money. We need to do this properly.

Exercise 3. Try to guess what social network is spoken about in each passage.

(1) This is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc., with more than 500 million active users in July 2010, which is about one person for every fourteen in the world. Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by workplace, school, or college. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be aged 13 or older to become a member of the website.

(2) This is a website, which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read other users' messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. The website is based in San Bruno, California near San Francisco (where the website was first based). Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, it has gained popularity worldwide and currently has more than 100 million users. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."

(3) This social networking website was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, in April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors.

Exercise 4. Correct the mistake. The sentence has one grammar mistake. Then answer the question “ Would banning peer-to-peer software reduce illegal copying?”