Hi Rod,
The first thing I'd recommend is that you switch to using explicit scaffolding. It'll give you a better default view of how Rails works. The use of the implicit scaffolding technique has pretty much come to be seen as something that's better left until someone's reached a fairly advanced knowledge of Rails and what it does by default.
To address your question more directly, I'm not sure the mix of Rails and HTML you've got in your view below is going to work. I could be wrong, but with the form tags being in html but the fields you want to return to the server being in embedded Ruby, I'd be surprised if Rails is generating the form html you need. Take a look at your page source and have a look.
WRT advancing your understanding of Rails, O'Reilly just published the second part of the updated "Rolling with Ruby on Rails" tutorial. It uses the explicit scaffolding.
Depending on what else you've already done, that might be a good place to start (please forgive the shameless self-delivered-plug).
hth, Bill