AI & Education Blog – Derek C. Briggs

Welcome to my blog on Artificial Intelligence in Education.

Here I share reflections, experiments, and lessons learned from integrating AI tools into my teaching and research practice. As someone who has spent decades thinking carefully about measurement and validity, I find the emergence of large language models both exciting and worthy of critical examination.

Topics I explore include:

AI for Teaching: How can LLMs like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT enhance student learning in statistics and psychometrics?
AI for Research: Using AI assistants for literature review, code development, and writing
Critical Perspectives: What are the limitations and risks of AI in educational contexts?
Hands-On Examples: Concrete demonstrations of AI-assisted tasks and projects

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From Chatting to Collaborating with AI

AI Literacy

Agentic AI

Generative AI

Research Workflow

How an eight-day collaboration with an AI agent took a manuscript that had been stalled for two years from fragments to submission, and what it taught me about the difference between chatting with AI and working with it.

Aug 19, 2026

AI Literacy and Informed Skepticism Part 4: How Can We Use AI Ethically?

AI Literacy

AI Ethics

Generative AI

Environment

The fourth and final entry in a four-part series on AI Literacy. I tackle the ethics question through the lens of AI’s environmental impact, the AlphaFold breakthrough, and the case for informed engagement over avoidance.

Apr 7, 2026

AI Literacy and Informed Skepticism Part 3: How Does AI Work?

AI Literacy

LLMs

Transformers

Mixture of Experts

Reasoning

The third in a four-part series on AI Literacy. A full walk through how LLMs are built—pre-training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning.

Mar 6, 2026

AI Literacy and Informed Skepticism Part 2: What Can AI Do?

AI Literacy

Generative AI

LLMs

Claude Code

The second in a four-part series on AI Literacy. I explore what AI can do through concrete examples of collaborating with Claude Code on psychometrics teaching materials, and argue that the real question isn’t what AI can do, but how well it can do it.

Feb 20, 2026