Don't read the article--contact the author.

 Something that interests me in terms of connectivism is the ways in which academia has in the previous several years proven itself a poor institution for the construction of novel information (at least in my field, English). The premise that one must have a university-sanctioned email account in order to access databases like EBSCO of MLA is a dated and silly idea. Recently, I read an essay about one of my favorite novels. I liked the essay a lot, so much so that I reached out to its author over twitter. She was kind enough to respond via email and had attached several of the essays she used as research material in the construction of her own. There's no reason all students (and people, for that matter) shouldn't have immediate access to interesting, engaging material, and beyond that, access to the generators of this material. The classroom doesn't belong to the university anymore, it's online. Im interested then in the ways in which technology can connect students directly to people with knowledge and interesting perspectives re: literature. I think it'd be interesting to instruct students on the ways in which one can reach out to someone in their field. We could give writing lessons on how to construct a formal email to an academic, we could teach research methods by helping students connect with actual academics, and we could have students join the conversation in the field itself by instructing them in how to generate questions worth pursuing in their own research projects/essayistic compositions. Because of technology, people with real experience in the field of literary analysis are available to contact. Instead of having students read the dry, academic analysis, why not teach them how to jump right to the source of that knowledge in a way that is constructive and meaningful? You can literally just email them and they will almost always respond (in my experience). This can show students that the institution of academe is available to them, and that they are capable of joining in simply by virtue of an internet connection.