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Our work is less about writing the perfect policy or developing best practice approaches and more about creating space for negotiation and collaborative meaning-making. We'd love to hear your thoughts on our paper.

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Detection, punishment and strict rules don’t take enough account of the complexity of how students think about and engage with AI. Instead, we argue for building space for dialogue where students and educators openly discuss dilemmas, values and trade-offs together.

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A key argument is that policy alone can't govern how students use AI. Student decisions are driven not just by rules but also by identity, trust, emotion, and life circumstance. This has important implications for academic integrity frameworks, assessment design, standards and qualifications.

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One used AI constantly and strategically, trusting AI because he knew it could not be trusted, quietly breaking the rules while insisting he was upholding his own personal standard of academic integrity, and anxious about getting caught, but not anxious enough to stop.

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One rejected AI outright, connecting her neurodivergence and belief in "earned" learning to a moral stance against it.

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Our participants all landed in different, unstable and sometimes self-contradictory places. One did not use AI but wanted his university to embrace AI faster, seeing it as essential for future employability and frustrated that his own children understood it better than his lecturers did.

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Through this lens, we considered how each student’s stance on AI was woven together from their identity, values, discipline, fears about employment, past experiences (including the Covid-19 pandemic), and relationships with their institution.

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A postgraduate maths education student and father An art history undergraduate with ADHD A psychology student working in retail We traced, in depth, how each one made sense of GenAI in their studies.

It questions assumptions that stricter conditions, or clearer policies and guidance will solve the challenge of AI and assessment. From our focus group data set (20 focus groups with 79 students across four Australian universities) we zoomed in to do an in-depth analysis of 3 student participants.

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Illuminating complex student realities of artificial intelligence through an entangled pedagogy framework - Higher Education

New open access study in Higher Education “Illuminating complex student realities of artificial intelligence through an entangled pedagogy framework” shows why university AI policies, rules and guidance cannot effectively change behaviour by themselves. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

link.springer.com

The emergence of widely available Generative AI (GenAI) in higher education demands nuanced responses that acknowledge the diversity of student contexts, conditions, practices and perspectives. Develo...

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I would love to hear your thoughts about the paper and about what challenges you've seen for EF/TF scholars, what experiences and tips you have.

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What do they care about? What are they preoccupied with? How do they understand the problem? What gets in their way? What helps them? What do they think would be useful? What do you think, having understood more about them and their situations, would be useful?

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The main argument is that it's important not to rush to a topic or to solve a problem or answer a question or prove something or measure something. It's about the need to get to know the context, and the people who work in the space you are looking to research.

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Holding the problem open: Resisting fixed destinations in research | Focus on Health Professional Education: A Multi-Professional Journal

Are you an education-focused academic who wants or needs to do education research? This open access paper contains my heartfelt advice re constructing a problem that is worth researching. The context is heath professions education but the premise is widely applicable. fohpe.org/FoHPE/articl...

fohpe.org

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Reposted by Tim Fawns

Philippe Dessus @pdessus.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

very nice ironic piece of text! #genai #higherEducation

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Reposted by Tim Fawns

Yu Kanazawa @knzw783.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

4Ps framework - product - process - performance - practice 🔓 Fawns, T., Boud, D., & Dawson, P. (2026). Identifying what our students have learned: A framework for practical assessment validation. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.1080/0260...

doi.org

Browse all journals

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We hope this prompts thinking and conversation around the fine grained alignment of what we ask students to do, we actually assess, and how we link that to what we value. Thoughts welcome!

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We also talk about the slipperyness of assessment design, where, e.g., we might intend to assess performance or process but end up assessing a product (e.g. a written account of process, or powerpoint slides as part of the presentation) which entail different capabilities from those intended.

We discuss the indirectness of evidence of learning. For example, product assessments don't tell us about how work was done or who contributed what. Process assessments don't tell us about student agency in making choices. Performance assessments only give a snapshot of situated capability.

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Identifying what our students have learned: a framework for practical assessment validation

I wrote this open access paper with Dave Boud and Phill Dawson to help educators align assessments with the kinds of learning they care about. We talk about 4P's (product, process, performance & practices) and what these different forms of evidence can tell us. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.com

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 educatio...

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Thanks! I feel like I should have figured that out 🤦‍♂️

Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Is there a quicker way to follow people back on Bluesky without opening each profile?

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

I feel that we inevitably do assess some different things with a for learning lens because feedback gives us a chance to say more things we care about. But I am wondering, philosophically, perhaps, if it is possible to assess some things "for learning" that are impossible to assess "of learning"

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

This probably means you are doing it right. Sorry. The awful truth is you don't actually find the right themes, you just stop at some point and go with the ones you have at that point. And then those might even change as you "write it up". But what you are doing right now, that's the process (IMO)

Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

Can you assess things via assessment for learning that you can't assess via assessment of learning?

Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

Raspberries cost about $2 per second at my house.

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

The panellists challenged us to slow down, think relationally, and critically examine the systems shaping education. From risks of homogenisation to the importance of sovereignty and refusal, Tristan and Tamika offered thoughts about how institutions might navigate AI ethically and inclusively.

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

How can we respect Indigenous Knowledges in responding to the challenges of AI in education? Watch Prof. Tristan Kennedy DVC Indigenous (Monash), Dr Tamika Worrell (Centre for Critical Indigenous Studies, Macquarie), chaired by Prof. Claire Palermo. teaching-community.monash.edu/respecting-i...

teaching-community.monash.edu

PAAIR challenge conversation: How can we respect Indigenous Knowledges in responding to the challenges of AI in education? – Monash Teaching Community

To me, all of this points to the need for educators to be trying to figure out this evolving educational context with students. Supportive, careful exploration and critique. I don't think extremes of resistance or adoption will help students where they are at. But that's up for debate!

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We also have focus group papers in the pipeline, looking at how students are thinking about GenAI, their questions and positions. Complex, diverse, entangled in rich conditions, contexts and beliefs, is what we're seeing. A lot of them are using GenAI even as they are worried about using it.

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...Students were concerned about GenAI feedback reliability + contextual / disciplinary expertise and valued relational aspect of teacher feedback. GenAI / teacher feedback serve different functions. It's not either/or.

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Comparing Generative AI and teacher feedback: student perceptions of usefulness and trustworthiness

New open access paper from AIinHE project, led by Michael Henderson www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Survey of 7k students from 4 Aus unis. Students valued GenAI feedback ease of access, timeliness, volume, understandability + felt less risky than seeking teacher feedback. But...

tandfonline.com

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-gener...

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

New chapter in "The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media", edited by Qi Wang and @andrewhoskins.bsky.social. academic.oup.com/book/59599/c... It critiques simplistic claims about effects of technology on memory. DM if you can't access it.

academic.oup.com

Photography, Digital Media, and Technology: Moving from Effects on Memory to Entanglements in Remembering Activity

AbstractBroad claims about the relationship between memory and photography, media, and the Internet are often based on thin evidence, derived mainly from a

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

2024 was a busy year, I'm pretty sure I've forgotten a bunch of things I did. It's a good paper, you should be proud.

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

D'oh, wrong James Lamb! Sorry to both Jameses.

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

So far, I have thought about the following: - apprenticeship - lab work - collaborative projects where educator is part of the group - supervised practice - co-authoring with students - peer-led teaching sessions - coaching (where coach has to collaborate with student, as in tennis)

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Tim Fawns @timbocop.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Hi all. I'm thinking about assessments where the assessor/educator works alongside students and gets a sense of their learning from collaborative involvement. Do you have examples (real or hypothetical) that you can offer for discussion?

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In terms of declarations made in advance of an outcome, the best we can say is that something is "a likely solution", taking into account the people, context and the conditions we believe to be in play.

It might not always solve all related problems. Which means it is only a solution to the problems it has already solved (rather than future, related problems) and it is probably a contingent solution, reliant on other factors.

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If it has solved a problem, it's probably in combination with other forces and influencing factors, in conditions conducive to the outcome that happened.

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And it's not inherently authentic, either.

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