Abstract:

Introduction: awareness of process:
We are 180 undergraduate students at the University of Rhode Island who are generating knowledge content in a Fishbowl; a digital platform where participants post self-reflections to common texts every week. Our visible reflections create an awareness of the other’s cognitive process. Situated in accounts of one’s “epistemic cognition,” we focus on our aims and processes of knowing. Cognition is ‘the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.’ Epistemic cognition is ‘awareness of the process of acquiring knowledge.’
“Artificial Intelligence" is a constellation of different technologies working together to enable machines to sense, comprehend, act, and learn with human-like intelligence. The goal of AI is to process large amounts of data and recognize patterns, make decisions, and judge like humans.
Since we experience the Fishbowl and ourselves as continuously changing, we believe the dynamic nature of our ‘being' must be the primary focus for any comprehensive account of acquiring knowledge. We are concerned with dynamic entities, like mental occurrences and the realization of individual values in action. In other words, the actual occasion of experience is central when creating knowledge content and knowing. In our paper, we present and identify processes and shifting relationships as the only real experience in the Fishbowl.

Purpose: to bring forth:
1. To share our process of acquiring knowledge and understanding.
2. To evoke thought-images when reading a text.

Method: a flow of processing information:
1. Metacognitive knowledge is the knowledge individuals develop of their own cognitive processes and their ability to monitor and reflect on them; how you think about your own thinking.
2. Metacognitive control characterizes one’s ability to identify learning needs and adapt behavior based on outcomes.
3. When posting in the Fishbowl, we experiment with “free association” and “reader response theory.” The individual’s response is a series of posts which are carried out to observe emerging outcomes. The participant takes inputs, adds value, and provides output for the viewer. The Fishbowl, as a whole, is a set of postings that interact with each other. Often, output of one is input for the other.
4. Postings are conceptual engagements with subjective feelings in fragments of textual snapshots.

Outcome: life of practice:
We restore significance to the practice of self-reflection. We are contemplative without relinquishing characteristics of action. Our process of acquiring knowledge is a “life of practice” where one develops as a “practicing person” and gets the self “into shape” as the “person-that-can.” It is the evolution of subjectivity, ways of feeling, thinking and communicating and, transcending situations. Within a context, the capability of a "practicing person" is viewed as their constitution, virtue, virtuosity, competence, excellence, or fitness for the job.

In the Fishbowl, we showcase our “life of practice”. In the full paper, we present a ‘triptych of works,' and invite viewers to expand upon them, and share their own practices and processes of reading and writing. Our paper is evidence that epistemic cognition and processing of information is more domain and task-specific rather than reproducing generalizations.

Keywords:

Cognition, Epistemic Cognition, Knowledge-content, Processing Information, Experiential Learning, Reflexivity, Thought-image, Artificial Intelligence.