I am resting on my work research and progressing slowly but begrudgingly on my course study today.

In fact, this winter course in systems integration will not have assignments. There will be three or four quizzes for our regular work. The first will be in the third lecture. To obtain a great mark in these quizzes requires conceptual understanding of the course material, in particular, understanding a certain model of the process of a system's design and integration. The recommended books turn out to be very prescribed methods or processes from the military and telecommunications industries. That is this seems to be a do it "our way or the highway" type of study. The statistics used by the authors of these books to justify adoption of these approaches are unreferenced claims in effect resembling marketing and promotions literature. So begrudgingly I move forward and read these references with the professor's promise that those who read these books have a better over all understanding of the course material.

I do need to cut down my study load to more manageable levels so the best thing to do at the moment is focus on doing the base line study for this course. I have put in close to three hours now for the first week. I need to do about twelve more hours reading before the next week's class. I have a busy week of training at work, political meetings and a new voluntary computer group is holding a meeting I would like to attend to help integrate and apply my studies on social computing.