#rawthought

Amy Burvall

Oct 2, 2017
10 min

#rawthought: 10 Ways We Can Do Cancer Differently

my minimalist self portrait It’s my ten year anniversary of being diagnosed (ironically in October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month), with a Stage 3 breast cancer. Since then I’ve had more than 20 related surgeries and have lost my mom to a double whammy of colon and breast cancer. I don’t have many photos of myself from that time period, though there’s a scarf-clad me popping up in a slide during my TEDx talk, in which I discuss the healing effect of collaborative creativity.

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#rawthought: The Beauty of Backwards Learning

Amy Burvall

Feb 22, 2017
4 min

#rawthought: The Beauty of Backwards Learning

Have you ever thought yourself to be a fraud in some respect? Have you questioned your so-called “expertise” in your field or even wondered, as so poetically expressed by eighties new waver-in-existentialist-disguise David Byrne, How did I get here? Whilst I am relatively confident in my own skills, experience, and talent, I’m certainly not immune to self-doubt. It occurred to me this morning that, while I love learning for learning’s sake, and continually seek out opportunit

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#rawthought: Your Ellie – On the Primacy of Networked Knowledge

Amy Burvall

Dec 8, 2016
3 min

#rawthought: Your Ellie – On the Primacy of Networked Knowledge

My 6th grade daughter had her first dance the other day (cue *sigh*). On the way to school in the morning there was some confusion as to what time the dance started – was it 5? 6? 7? Normally this would not be an issue but on this particular night I was off to see one of my most beloved bands – the Psychedelic Furs – in concert for the first time! Trying to problem solve whilst belting out Pretty in Pink, I suggested that she search for the dance time on the calendar on the s

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#rawthought: Quellancholy: The Creative Frenzy Begat by Melancholy

Amy Burvall

Apr 1, 2016
2 min

#rawthought: Quellancholy: The Creative Frenzy Begat by Melancholy

I have a love/hate relationship with the feeling of melancholy. It happens to me a lot…sometimes for inexplicable reasons. My mother had it too, and I always remember when she was sad and didn’t want to communicate with anyone she delved into some creative project- sewing… painting…or even building a tiki bar! Perhaps I inherited it, but the more overwhelmed I am by these “blue funks” I seem to want to create things. Most of my song lyrics for History for Music Lovers were wr

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#rawthought: What If We…Ditch “Best Practices”?

Amy Burvall

Mar 25, 2016
3 min

#rawthought: What If We…Ditch “Best Practices”?

When was the last time you were asked to share “best practices”? This phrase came up yesterday for me in a Twitter chat, and it suddenly dawned on me that I take issue with the term. It sounds too authoritative and stagnant, with shades of “expert” at which I tend to cringe. I totally get the motive- we want to hear from people who have had some degree of success in fill-in-the-blank. We want to know their secrets..what “works”…what we can “count on”. We are drawn to “proven

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#rawthought: Learning the Weird, Wonderful, Worrisome

Amy Burvall

Feb 26, 2016
2 min

#rawthought: Learning the Weird, Wonderful, Worrisome

Took a drive today and that is my number one mundane thing to do to get creative inspiration. I can’t tell you how many ideas I have had to write on receipts strewn on the car seats or notes hastily recorded on my phone. Today I was thinking about Learning Steve Wheeler had just published a blog about a short film I saw yesterday called What Is Learning? I plan to pen another post regarding that, but in pondering I thought about a reflective tool I like to use with my daughte

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Amy Burvall

Feb 18, 2016
3 min

#rawthought: Knock on Paper

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of learning and teaching (in the form of presentations and workshops) on the subject of Creativity. How does it work? What can we learn from the creative processes of others? Why do we need to cultivate it in ourselves and students? What role will it play in the new economy – in the very future for which we are preparing our children? And finally – this is the crux- how does one do it? My approach to creativity is that it is essentially about dot-

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Amy Burvall

Jan 1, 2015
2 min

#rawthought: Skinny Jean Goals

In a recent keynote for CUE, in my discussion of learning spaces I mentioned a school I’d read about that posted “mood board” type photos of their aspiring visions of their up-and-coming ideal media center. Not only did these images guide the design process, but they were constant reminders of the progress of the project, and served to inspire hope when the going got frustrating. My analogy (because I tend to always think in metaphor) was to “Skinny Jean Goals”. This hit home

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#rawthought: Personal Palettes: Claiming your COLOURs for your Digital Presence

Amy Burvall

Dec 28, 2014
4 min

#rawthought: Personal Palettes: Claiming your COLOURs for your Digital Presence

First off, I need to admit that I am American but have adopted the OU in certain words like “colour” – perhaps it’s all the Agatha Christie books I read as a kid (I remember getting “glamour” marked wrong on a 6th grade spelling test), or perhaps it’s because I have a lot of dear friends from the UK and Canada. Sorry if it seems a bit pretentious, but this post is about crafting an image and sticking to it – not caving into the “norm” or external pressures. This is a #rawthou

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Amy Burvall

Nov 22, 2014
1 min

#rawthought: Just An Idea

On the plane ride back from attending Mozfest in London so many thoughts were swimming in my head but I was in the midst of changing careers, strangely enough, and needless to say had no time (or so I thought) to devote to a well-composed blog post. After a few weeks’ time it’s occurred to me that I can perhaps create a new category on this blog space where I can just throw down a “quick and dirty” question or musing, relatively brief and unrefined – “raw”, as it were. So, af

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Also....Advent (an Alternative Advent Calendar, 2020)

Amy Burvall

Dec 28, 2020
6 min

Also....Advent (an Alternative Advent Calendar, 2020)

This year I decided to once again use the digital Advent calendar creation site https://tuerchen.com/ However, I noticed that they don't...

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Amy Burvall

Nov 29, 2020
1 min

The #globalthankswondercut project

If you were to write a love letter to the world what would it be? A Crowdsourced Creativity Project In the midst of this global pandemic...

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