Tim Fawns
Biographic Data
| ID | 2824614 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tim Fawns |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tim |
| FAMILY NAME | Fawns |
| SIGNATURE | FAWNS T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5014-2662 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Impact of Advance HE Fellowships on professional identity as an educator
Educator identity plays an important role in shaping teaching practice and professional development in higher education. While Advance HE Fellowships have gained prominence as a form of professional recognition globally, their impact on educator identity – particularly in non-UK contexts – remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating how the attainment of Fellowship and ongoing engagement with Fellowship-related activitie…
Time, emotions and moral judgements
The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) in higher education has prompted considerable discussion within the research community. Despite their centrality, students’ perspectives remain underexplored. We investigated how students position GenAI in relation to their studies, conducting focus groups with 79 students across four Australian universities. Taking a sociotechnical stance and employing reflexive thematic analysis, we identified three primar…
Tomorrow's doctors are robots
Parody is an important form of imitation that can be used to critique problematic assumptions and discourses. We use parody in this article to warn against the overzealous infusion of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare and healthcare education. In doing so, our intention is not to discount some potential benefits of carefully considered AI integration into these contexts. Rather, we call readers' attention to important aspects that coul…
Identifying what our students have learned
Universities are responsible for safeguarding the value of qualifications through assessment that generates trustworthy evidence about what students know and can do. Public trust in higher education depends on the credibility of these inferences. Yet, in practice, assessment often rests on inappropriate inferences drawn from misaligned or inadequate evidence. This conceptual article addresses that problem by reframing assessment validity, not as …
Feeling AI
This study investigates how students emotionally and morally engage with artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education (HE). Through a sociotechnical lens of AI and drawing on a Sara Ahmed’s frame of affective economies, we report on a national survey ( n = 8021) with qualitative focus groups ( n = 79) to explore the emotional textures of student experiences. Quantitative findings reveal strong co-occurrences of optimism with excitement, refle…
Choreography and improvisation in hybrid teaching
Ideas of space within higher education are changing, influenced by pedagogical innovation, emerging technologies, and the experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is most obvious in the expansion of hybrid education, where teaching happens simultaneously both online and on the physical campus. Hybrid learning spaces emerge from dynamic, sociomaterial entanglements that include a range of stakeholders, contextual elements, teaching methods, infr…
Authentic assessment
Authentic assessment is often positioned as an educational panacea, invoked in response to a broad range of complex problems. This paper considers authentic assessment in relation to three key challenges: preparing graduates for the future, cheating, and inclusion. Despite literature supporting its potential benefits, there is limited evidence on the relationship between authentic assessment and these challenges. Through an uncritical blending of…
Comparing Generative AI and teacher feedback
The rapid integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into educational contexts has presented both opportunities and challenges for students seeking and using feedback. While AI-generated feedback can offer increased access, timely responses and personalised insights, concerns about the quality of AI-generated feedback still persist, including issues of bias, factual inaccuracies, and homogenisation. This study investigates how stud…
Rethinking the value proposition of assessment at a time of rapid development in generative artificial intelligence
The authors argue for evolving assessment practices by focusing on their value proposition to educators (producing the medical graduates needed for society) rather than protecting existing processes
Mapping and Tracing the Postdigital
The launch of Postdigital Science and Education helped generate a burst of new scholarship about this emerging turn in educational research and theory. Yet, what it means to do postdigital research remains obscure to many. Ongoing debates around definitions, combined with the complexity of analysing digital activity within rich contexts that are also social, material, political, economic, and so on, make it challenging to understand what constitu…
The role of teachers in a sustainable university
An increase in online and hybrid education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the infiltration of digital media into mainstream university teaching. Global challenges, such as ecological crises, call for further radical changes in university teaching, requiring an even richer convergence of ‘natural,’ ‘human’ and ‘digital’. In this paper, we argue that this convergence demands us to go beyond ‘the great online transiti…
An Entangled Pedagogy
‘Pedagogy first’ has become a mantra for educators, supported by the metaphor of the ‘pedagogical horse’ driving the ‘technological cart’. Yet putting technology first or last separates it from pedagogy, making us susceptible to technological or pedagogical determinism (i.e. where technology is seen either as the driving force of change or as a set of neutral tools). In this paper, I present a model of entangled pedagogy that encapsulates the mut…
Beyond Technology in Online Postgraduate Education
Participatory alignment
The expansionist nature of the higher education sector has led to an increase in the provision of online Masters programmes. Many of these programmes are offered part-time attracting working professionals. The dissertation component that can be the culmination of many of these degrees is largely unexplored. A constructivist grounded theory investigation of the relationship between online Masters dissertation students and their supervisors was und…
Cued recall
In studies of cued recall, responses to photographic stimuli have often been examined in isolation of related photography practices (e.g. taking, organising, or sharing images), and without considering how photographs are used. In contrast, photo-elicitation methods position photographs not simply as cues, but as meaningful artefacts around which accounts of the past are constructed. Drawing on photo-elicitation interviews, I examine cued recall …
Remembering in the wild
Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, practices or cultures of the media with which people remember than studies of ‘memory in the wild’, where memory is seen to extend beyond the individual, into the distributed activities of people and material things. While memory in the head is, apparently, individual and susceptible to universal effects, memory in the wild is emergent and relational. St…
Networked Learning in 2021
Introduction (Networked Learning Editorial Collective): Since the turn of this century, much of the world has undergone a tectonic socio-technological change. Computers have left the isolated basements of research institutes and entered people's homes. Network connectivity has advanced from slow and unreliable modems to high-speed broadband. Devices have evolved: from stationary desktop computers to ever-present, always-connected smartphones. The…
Ecological Teaching Evaluation vs the Datafication of Quality
Current evaluation of higher education programmes is driven primarily by economic concerns, with a resulting imbalance towards the summative assessment of teaching and away from faculty development. These agendas are advanced through datafication, in which the transformation of social and material activity into digital data is producing a narrow, instrumental view of education. Taking a postdigital perspective on contemporary practices of evaluat…
How can inhabited institutionalism inform the analysis of medical education
Seamful learning and professional education
Workplaces are complex, dynamic spaces. While some practices are routine and highly predictable, informed by disciplinary and practical knowledge, others are unpredictable and emergent. Outcomes-based education, characterised by standardised, objective measurement of performance under controlled conditions, might be appropriate for routinised practice, but cannot account for emergent forms of professional knowledge. Somewhere between developing p…
Enchantment - Disenchantment-Re-Enchantment
Postdigital Education in Design and Practice
Digital education is one of a number of terms (including e-learning, technology-enhanced learning, online learning, blended learning) that have seen increasing use in educational discourse and in the branding of educational programmes. A lack of conceptual clarity around such terms makes it easier for different groups to appropriate them in the service of conflicting agendas. In this paper, I discuss the pros and cons of the tendency to distingui…
Blended memory
This article offers a framework for understanding how different kinds of memory work together in interaction with people, photographs and other resources. Drawing on evidence from two qualitative studies of photography and memory, as well as literature from cognitive psychology, distributed cognition and media studies, I highlight complexities that have seldom been taken into account in cognitive psychology research. I then develop a ‘blended mem…
Socially reconstructing history
For centuries, print media controlled by powerful gatekeepers have played a dominant part in the recording and construction of history. Digital media open up new opportunities for the social construction of historical narratives that reveal personal and situated viewpoints. In January 2012, work began at the University of Edinburgh on the design, development and distribution of a web-based Social History Timestream application for social history …
Lessons from personal photography
Enchantment - Disenchantment-Re-Enchantment
Blended memory
This article offers a framework for understanding how different kinds of memory work together in interaction with people, photographs and other resources. Drawing on evidence from two qualitative studies of photography and memory, as well as literature from cognitive psychology, distributed cognition and media studies, I highlight complexities that have seldom been taken into account in cognitive psychology research. I then develop a ‘blended mem…
Remembering in the wild
Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, practices or cultures of the media with which people remember than studies of ‘memory in the wild’, where memory is seen to extend beyond the individual, into the distributed activities of people and material things. While memory in the head is, apparently, individual and susceptible to universal effects, memory in the wild is emergent and relational. St…
Cued recall
In studies of cued recall, responses to photographic stimuli have often been examined in isolation of related photography practices (e.g. taking, organising, or sharing images), and without considering how photographs are used. In contrast, photo-elicitation methods position photographs not simply as cues, but as meaningful artefacts around which accounts of the past are constructed. Drawing on photo-elicitation interviews, I examine cued recall …
Lessons from personal photography
Socially reconstructing history
For centuries, print media controlled by powerful gatekeepers have played a dominant part in the recording and construction of history. Digital media open up new opportunities for the social construction of historical narratives that reveal personal and situated viewpoints. In January 2012, work began at the University of Edinburgh on the design, development and distribution of a web-based Social History Timestream application for social history …
Postdigital Education in Design and Practice
Digital education is one of a number of terms (including e-learning, technology-enhanced learning, online learning, blended learning) that have seen increasing use in educational discourse and in the branding of educational programmes. A lack of conceptual clarity around such terms makes it easier for different groups to appropriate them in the service of conflicting agendas. In this paper, I discuss the pros and cons of the tendency to distingui…
Blended memory
This article offers a framework for understanding how different kinds of memory work together in interaction with people, photographs and other resources. Drawing on evidence from two qualitative studies of photography and memory, as well as literature from cognitive psychology, distributed cognition and media studies, I highlight complexities that have seldom been taken into account in cognitive psychology research. I then develop a ‘blended mem…
Enchantment - Disenchantment-Re-Enchantment
Networked Learning in 2021
Introduction (Networked Learning Editorial Collective): Since the turn of this century, much of the world has undergone a tectonic socio-technological change. Computers have left the isolated basements of research institutes and entered people's homes. Network connectivity has advanced from slow and unreliable modems to high-speed broadband. Devices have evolved: from stationary desktop computers to ever-present, always-connected smartphones. The…
Ecological Teaching Evaluation vs the Datafication of Quality
Current evaluation of higher education programmes is driven primarily by economic concerns, with a resulting imbalance towards the summative assessment of teaching and away from faculty development. These agendas are advanced through datafication, in which the transformation of social and material activity into digital data is producing a narrow, instrumental view of education. Taking a postdigital perspective on contemporary practices of evaluat…
How can inhabited institutionalism inform the analysis of medical education
Seamful learning and professional education
Workplaces are complex, dynamic spaces. While some practices are routine and highly predictable, informed by disciplinary and practical knowledge, others are unpredictable and emergent. Outcomes-based education, characterised by standardised, objective measurement of performance under controlled conditions, might be appropriate for routinised practice, but cannot account for emergent forms of professional knowledge. Somewhere between developing p…
An Entangled Pedagogy
‘Pedagogy first’ has become a mantra for educators, supported by the metaphor of the ‘pedagogical horse’ driving the ‘technological cart’. Yet putting technology first or last separates it from pedagogy, making us susceptible to technological or pedagogical determinism (i.e. where technology is seen either as the driving force of change or as a set of neutral tools). In this paper, I present a model of entangled pedagogy that encapsulates the mut…
Beyond Technology in Online Postgraduate Education
Participatory alignment
The expansionist nature of the higher education sector has led to an increase in the provision of online Masters programmes. Many of these programmes are offered part-time attracting working professionals. The dissertation component that can be the culmination of many of these degrees is largely unexplored. A constructivist grounded theory investigation of the relationship between online Masters dissertation students and their supervisors was und…
Cued recall
In studies of cued recall, responses to photographic stimuli have often been examined in isolation of related photography practices (e.g. taking, organising, or sharing images), and without considering how photographs are used. In contrast, photo-elicitation methods position photographs not simply as cues, but as meaningful artefacts around which accounts of the past are constructed. Drawing on photo-elicitation interviews, I examine cued recall …
Remembering in the wild
Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, practices or cultures of the media with which people remember than studies of ‘memory in the wild’, where memory is seen to extend beyond the individual, into the distributed activities of people and material things. While memory in the head is, apparently, individual and susceptible to universal effects, memory in the wild is emergent and relational. St…
Mapping and Tracing the Postdigital
The launch of Postdigital Science and Education helped generate a burst of new scholarship about this emerging turn in educational research and theory. Yet, what it means to do postdigital research remains obscure to many. Ongoing debates around definitions, combined with the complexity of analysing digital activity within rich contexts that are also social, material, political, economic, and so on, make it challenging to understand what constitu…
The role of teachers in a sustainable university
An increase in online and hybrid education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the infiltration of digital media into mainstream university teaching. Global challenges, such as ecological crises, call for further radical changes in university teaching, requiring an even richer convergence of ‘natural,’ ‘human’ and ‘digital’. In this paper, we argue that this convergence demands us to go beyond ‘the great online transiti…
Rethinking the value proposition of assessment at a time of rapid development in generative artificial intelligence
The authors argue for evolving assessment practices by focusing on their value proposition to educators (producing the medical graduates needed for society) rather than protecting existing processes
Choreography and improvisation in hybrid teaching
Ideas of space within higher education are changing, influenced by pedagogical innovation, emerging technologies, and the experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is most obvious in the expansion of hybrid education, where teaching happens simultaneously both online and on the physical campus. Hybrid learning spaces emerge from dynamic, sociomaterial entanglements that include a range of stakeholders, contextual elements, teaching methods, infr…
Authentic assessment
Authentic assessment is often positioned as an educational panacea, invoked in response to a broad range of complex problems. This paper considers authentic assessment in relation to three key challenges: preparing graduates for the future, cheating, and inclusion. Despite literature supporting its potential benefits, there is limited evidence on the relationship between authentic assessment and these challenges. Through an uncritical blending of…
Comparing Generative AI and teacher feedback
The rapid integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) into educational contexts has presented both opportunities and challenges for students seeking and using feedback. While AI-generated feedback can offer increased access, timely responses and personalised insights, concerns about the quality of AI-generated feedback still persist, including issues of bias, factual inaccuracies, and homogenisation. This study investigates how stud…
Impact of Advance HE Fellowships on professional identity as an educator
Educator identity plays an important role in shaping teaching practice and professional development in higher education. While Advance HE Fellowships have gained prominence as a form of professional recognition globally, their impact on educator identity – particularly in non-UK contexts – remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating how the attainment of Fellowship and ongoing engagement with Fellowship-related activitie…
Time, emotions and moral judgements
The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) in higher education has prompted considerable discussion within the research community. Despite their centrality, students’ perspectives remain underexplored. We investigated how students position GenAI in relation to their studies, conducting focus groups with 79 students across four Australian universities. Taking a sociotechnical stance and employing reflexive thematic analysis, we identified three primar…
Tomorrow's doctors are robots
Parody is an important form of imitation that can be used to critique problematic assumptions and discourses. We use parody in this article to warn against the overzealous infusion of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare and healthcare education. In doing so, our intention is not to discount some potential benefits of carefully considered AI integration into these contexts. Rather, we call readers' attention to important aspects that coul…
Identifying what our students have learned
Universities are responsible for safeguarding the value of qualifications through assessment that generates trustworthy evidence about what students know and can do. Public trust in higher education depends on the credibility of these inferences. Yet, in practice, assessment often rests on inappropriate inferences drawn from misaligned or inadequate evidence. This conceptual article addresses that problem by reframing assessment validity, not as …
Feeling AI
This study investigates how students emotionally and morally engage with artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education (HE). Through a sociotechnical lens of AI and drawing on a Sara Ahmed’s frame of affective economies, we report on a national survey ( n = 8021) with qualitative focus groups ( n = 79) to explore the emotional textures of student experiences. Quantitative findings reveal strong co-occurrences of optimism with excitement, refle…
Psychology (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Political science (10 works) · Digital Education and Society (9 works) · Pedagogy (9 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Higher Education Practises and Engagement (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Higher education (6 works)