Welcome!

I'd like to welcome my friends and students to the inaugrual post of buleocracy! The purpose of this blog is not just to document my experience as a "bule" (foreigner) here in Indonesia, but to also give practice in English language reading, writing and commentary to my students. Blogging is an excellent way to exchange ideas and express your opinion. Anyone can be a blogger, and it is my hope that each of you will share your own blogs with your friends or to create new blogs of your own in any language you choose!

For the purposes of our class project, our objectives/rules for our blogs will be:

-All blogging will be conducted solely in English. Feel free, naturally, to create companion blogs in Acehnese, Indonesian, Arabic or any language you want.

-You can blog about anything you want to provided the material is not offensive. Generally, blogs are free speech. People often blog about politics, religion, social justice issues etc. For the purposes of our class work, we will stick to posting about anything that is NOT controversial. As above, feel free to create companion blogs to express more controversial sentiments.

-You should post comments on classmates' blogs. Even if it's just a sentence that reads "nice work Daniel!", the more practice you have in expressing English here the more successful the exercise. Even better would be a running discussion with questions for the original poster!

-If you can, post something small every three days. Feel free to post as MUCH as you want. Blogging is often as simple as keeping an online diary. Posting that you had a great day at a coffee shop is all that is needed sometimes. Developing a readership and an interesting blog takes time.

-Provide pictures, if you can.

I look forward to seeing what all of you have to say! We have an idiom in English, "my door is always open", this means that I am always willing to talk to you and help you with your English proficiency. If you don't understand what was expressed, or you want help expressing yourself, please let me know. Don't be afraid to ask questions. You can contact me in private through email at smurgleton@gmail.com if you need to, but questions are best expressed in the comments section of the blog for others to see.