The master at work.

via 37signals.com

A few months ago my wife discovered that there is a right way and a wrong way to wear bobby pins. One way works well and the bobby pin holds the hair in place. The other way the bobby pin falls out. Turns out she had been using them the wrong way.

Bobby pins have two sides: a flat side and a wavy side. The right way to wear them is with the flat side out, wavy side facing the scalp. This way, the flat side presses the hair into the wavy side and it stays in place.

My wife doesn’t remember ever being taught how to use a bobby pin. She just used what she thought was conventional wisdom and never questioned it. All she had to do was turn the pin over, but instead of trying alternate configurations, she assumed that bobby pins just didn’t work very well and therefore avoided them. Now, knowing the right way she uses them all the time.

How does the “wrong way” of doing something become the prevailing wisdom? Especially when doing things the “right way” isn’t much more difficult than the “wrong way.”

The conventional, prevailing wisdom about how to create presentations is often wrong as well. Full-bleed images and one-idea-per-slide isn’t hard to do, but most people never give these things a try. They just assume that PowerPoint isn’t a good tool. That it doesn’t work well. And it’s to be avoided.

Fortunately, the “right way” of doing things when it comes to presenting is well documented by experts like Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds. All you have to do is wonder if there might be a better way and start looking for it.

(Image credit: Phlora)

“Steal Like an Artist” is an awesome looking new book by Austin Kleon. The book is based on a talk he gave at Broome Community College in Binghamton, NY (my parents’ hometown) about creativity.

Austin turned that talk into a blog post and then that blog post into a book. You can read an excerpt of the blog post (the rest has been redacted for obvious reasons) on Austin’s site and see a quick flip-through of the book here.

I just ordered my copy.

A little visual inspiration for your Thursday morning. Enjoy!

I’ve been playing around with a new iPad app for a few days and just have to tell you about it. It’s one of the most fun tools for teaching digitally that I’ve come across. Watch the video above to see a little of what it can do.

(By the way, I’m working on getting the featured videos to show up in my RSS feed, so if you’re an RSS subscriber, please bear with me. I hope to have that done by the end of the week.)

As you can see from the video, it’s called Doodlecast Pro. It makes it really simple to record your voice along with doodles, annotations, and any pictures from your camera roll. It comes with tons of preset backgrounds like lined paper, grid paper, music staves, sports fields, or even storyboards. And it makes sharing your recorded videos really easy.

Perhaps the best thing about the app is its price. At just $$3.99 it’s significantly cheaper than Apple’s Keynote and much more natural to use, in my opinion.

Paired with an iPad Digital AV Adapter  or with Airplay to a Mac or Apple TV, I think this app has the potential to change the way teachers or speakers share with their audiences. I’d love to see some innovative presentations using Doodlecast Pro in the future, perhaps a little like this one.

I also look forward to seeing what additional capabilities they add to the app in later versions.

Incidentally, I’ve also been using the Cosmonaut iPad stylus for a while now and it works really well with Doodlecast Pro. I like that it feels more like a whiteboard marker than a pen, which is better for the type of writing and drawing that I do on the iPad.