Keynote Speakers
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Adam Phyall, III, EDD
Director of Professional Learning and Leadership, All4Ed
Friday, November 3, 2023
Dr. Eileen M. Hunt
Fellow, Nanovic Institute for European Studies; Concurrent Faculty, Gender Studies, University of Notre Dame
Keynote: Artificial Intelligence: Frankenstein and the Ethics of Modern Education — learn more
Dr. Adam Phyall III is the Director of Professional Learning and Leadership for Future Ready Schools and former Director of Technology and Library Media Services for Newton County School System in Covington, GA. Since Adam got his first laptop in college, he has been hooked on the fantastic things that technology can add. Early in his teaching career, Adam began having students create videos and podcasts to explain advanced science concepts. Once Adam saw the impact that technology had on learning in his classroom, he began to share his activities and strategies with his peers. This led to Dr. Phyall working as a Building Instructional Technology Leader and later as a Director of Technology & Media Services.
Throughout his professional career, Dr.Phyall worked extensively with Title I and Urban schools to improve technology integration with economically disadvantaged students. He has planned and developed Mobile Learning plans for school districts in Georgia and Missouri that have led to 1:1 device initiatives. His philosophy on teaching is “if you’re having fun teaching it, then your students will have fun learning it.”
Dr. Adam Phyall is a former high school science teacher who recently served as the Director of Technology and Media Services for Newton County School System in Covington, GA. Since Adam got his first laptop in college, he has been hooked on the fantastic things that technology can add. Early in his teaching career, Adam began having students create videos and podcasts to explain advanced science concepts. Once Adam saw the impact that technology had on learning in his classroom, he began to share his activities and strategies with his peers. This led to Dr. Phyall working as a Building Instructional Technology Leader, later as a Technology Facilitator, and as the former Director of Technology & Media Services.
Since 2017 Dr. Phyall has worked as a Future Ready Schools as a Thought Leader and later as the Technology Leaders lead advisor. As a facilitator and panelist, Adam has supported Future Ready Schools at in-person and virtual events. Adam also co-hosts the Future Ready Schools’ “UnDisrupted” podcast with Carl Hooker. In their podcast, Adam and Carl break down many of the challenges that district-level leaders face each day.
Dr. Phyall holds an educational doctorate in Digital Transformation from Capella University, an educational specialist degree in media and instructional technology from the University of West Georgia, a master’s degree in technology integration from Walden University, and a bachelor’s degree in general science education from Tuskegee University.
Eileen M. Hunt, Professor of Political Science at University of Notre Dame, has argued in her book Artificial Life After Frankenstein (Penn Press, 2020) that Mary Shelley envisioned the development of AI, for good and for ill, in the figure of Frankenstein’s technologically-made creature. In this lecture, she will begin by exploring the intellectual roots of Mary Shelley’s conception of AI by tracing her critical engagement with the leading Enlightenment-era educational and political philosophies from Thomas Hobbes to her mother Mary Wollstonecraft. Hunt will draw out the implications of Mary Shelley’s engagement with Enlightenment theories of non-tyrannical education and rights-based democratic politics for contemporary ethics of AI and the beneficial use of AI technologies in the education of youth toward self-governance and autonomous citizenship today.
Eileen Hunt is a Professor of Political Science at University of Notre Dame and a political theorist whose scholarly interests cover modern political thought, feminism, the family, rights, ethics of technology, and philosophy and literature. She has taught at Notre Dame since she received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale in 2001. She has five solo-authored books: Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (SUNY, 2006); Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights (Yale, 2016); Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in ‘Frankenstein’ (Penn Press, 2018), Artificial Life After Frankenstein (Penn Press, 2021), and The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Post-Apocalyptic Imagination (forthcoming from Penn Press in April 2024). In 2022, Artificial Life After Frankenstein won the David Easton Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association, for “a book that broadens the horizons of contemporary political science by engaging issues of philosophical significance in political life through any of a variety of approaches in the social sciences and humanities.”
