A Research Task: Asylum

Keeping focused. You may need to remind students that their job here is not to report on the safety of their chosen country, but to evaluate a number of websites for their reliability and usefulness on this subject.

Requiring depth. Students often require considerable prodding to produce more than a cursory assessment.  Remind them that investigating an author's identity, credentials, and agenda must go beyond a quick google search or reading of a provided biography. Assessment of the integrity of information requires actual close reading of the material, another step students can be loath to take.

Detecting bias. Above all, students may be quick to assume that their source lacks a hidden agenda simply because it comes from a non-profit or governmental source. In fact, one site that students invariably land upon is the U.S. Department of State's collection of Consular Travel Warnings. These are often presented as highly reliable to the point of infallibility. It may be a good idea to lead a discussion as to what interests the government might have in slanting its presentation of a nation's safety conditions, as well as what inaccuracies it might unwittingly produce. This may in itself be another little research project with a valuable object lesson: suspicion of apparently neutral sources.

Demonstrating the task. One other tip: a nice thing about this exercise is that it is endlessly variable since the different nations students choose to base their research on will set the terms of discussion. However, Mexico makes an excellent choice for class demonstration purposes because the complex issues of the U.S.-Mexican border and the massive amount of American tourism in Mexico ensure highly charged and biased sources.