I know it is fairly well documented around the web that some of the old 'ROR up and running' tutorials are a bit difficult to digest with the new features in in Rails 2.0. So, I wanted to document my findings. And provide links to the resources that have helped me.

Here's a couple of resources to get started:

akitaonrails.com
weblog.infoworld.com

Stay posted for more of my findings.

So I am calling it Generic American with a splash of Modern Vintage...I guess. I'm having one of those moments as a designer when the 'correct' images are present in my mind's eye, but for various reasons they haven't formulated on the canvas. Yet...but what the heck - I'm in no real hurry. I want to savor the taste of this one.

I absolutely love working on peacefield.info. It is a designer's dream, absolute creative freedom. An opportunity to shine, explore, create and innovate.

So what do I have to work with? Not much yet, and that is ok in some respects, because I don't want to ever steer away from my built in 'open source' aesthetic: championing the best of free fonts and hacked, and neo-Dadaist imagery. This new concoction hopes to blend cinematic urban cityscapes, with an adaptation of the ever trendy rustic earth tone color palette.(see my post on the the Neo-Green Aesthetic)

Actually, keyboardist R. Bruce Phillips says it best:

Peacefield isn't so "Pleasantville." It's grittier, even darker maybe -- or at least it has that side. Kind of like in the face of the ubiquitous B&W photo of the old man who lives on the street. He is generic, he is vintage. His face tells who knows what variety of stories? Some lovely, and some horrific, to be sure.

But there is peace still. His old weather face still attracts us.

Some may not see readily the quality of peace about this town. They might think it a contradiction, or irony, that the gritty, mysterious town has such a "nice" name as "Peacefield." Of course, America is full of contradiction and ironies, and people who don't get it when others do.

Technorati Profile

Main Page - SIMILE

SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores.

SIMILE will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemata and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.

To guide the SIMILE effort we will focus on well-defined, real-world use cases in the libraries domain. Since parallel work is underway to deploy DSpace at a number of leading research libraries, we hope that such an approach will lead to a powerful deployment channel through which the utility and readiness of semantic web tools and techniques can be compellingly demonstrated in a visible and global community.

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I've been watching the growing number of universities adopting drupal for their content management, podcasting, blogging and wiki integration needs. Here's my current list.

• UT at Austin - Department of Rhetoric and Writing - http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/
• Rice University - http://sa.rice.edu/
• Arizona State University - http://www.asu.edu/
• UNC Charlotte University Center Information Technology - http://ucit01.uncc.edu
• Brigham Young University (BYU) – Computer Science Department http://cs.byu.edu/
• Bradley University - http://slane.bradley.edu/
• Washington University in St. Louis - http://artsci.wustl.edu/
• University of Calgary - http://www.ucalgary.ca/
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) http://fab.cba.mit.edu/central/
• Purdue University - http://www.digitalparlor.org/pwenglish/
• Michigan State University - Nondestructive Evaluation Laboratory - http://www.egr.msu.edu/ndel/home

Other Drupal Sites related to Innovation in Education include:

• connect.educause.edu - http://connect.educause.edu/
• The International Center for Integrative Studies (ICIS) - http://www.icisonline.org/
• IDEAL (Integrated Data Enhancing Arizona's Learning) - https://www.ideal.azed.gov
• Texas Digital Library - http://www.tdl.org/

If you know of any others - give us a shout.

Is it really necessary to purchase text books for those computer classes anymore? Take a look at your content area on each of these sites. You be the judge.

• 1. freecomputerbooks.com
• 2. freetechbooks.com
• 3. techtoolblog.com
• 4. computer-books.us
• 5. onlinecomputerbooks.com

...as this list expands keep track here: del.icio.us/cravens/freebook

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• admin's blog

News Update

The university’s Faculty Committee on Educational Technology (FCET) said the decision followed on an earlier pledge to support its view that UCLA students, “now require a consistent, powerful, and transparent application of our educational technology applications across disciplines and across the campus.”

The decision to choose Moodle over Sakai as its convergence platform FCET said, “was based on many factors that, over time, led us to believe it to be a better match for UCLA’s current needs.” But the school intends to continue as a Sakai Foundation member, and “as capacity is available, to work with others in the Sakai, Moodle, and IMS communities who are interested in working on data, tool, and language interoperability solutions.”

Open Culture: The Hottest Course on iTunes (and the Future of Digital Education)

I'll be using this podcast, the Understanding Computers course from Harvard in my Computer Systems inservice. This will serve a number of purposes...to enhance my own instruction, and to open educators to the value of podcasting in education.

Linux's Education Push
When it comes to desktop PCs, schools could be the first, real place where Linux grabs hold.

"So Dad," he asked. "What is the difference between Linux and Windows?" I tried to explain but it was a waste of breath. "What difference do you see?" I asked back.

"Nothing, really."

Ubuntu Multimedia Center - A new Ubuntu-based Linux distribution -- Debian Admin

Ubuntu Multimedia Center
is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with
community and professional support.It is also a live cd that is ubuntu
derived and also free. This system was inspired by the fact that ubuntu
didn’t have much of a multimedia center.Because users would have to
manually download the codecs for playing mp3’s and what not.The mail
objective of this project is multimedia related programs available to
users as easy as possible.

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Congratulations to my students for their great work on iBoerne.com. Our submission for Student Showcase
has been accepted for the 2007 TCEA Convention !

iBoerne.com: an Interactive Online Game for Programming Students | jessecravens.com