<p>Could you send some of that down here to lower Michigan? Another cool, dreary wet day...</p>
<p>tsdad, it is so nice of you to update us on Madison - one of my favorite places. Too bad, my son did not choose to go there....it is lovely!!</p>
<p>tsdad, my recollection from my grad school days is that spring comes every year in Madison; it's just a question of timing. We used to love this time of year, heading up to Spring Green and taking in the greenery and hills and cows and whatever along the way.</p>
<p>tsdad, thanks for sharing the wonderful pictures of a great campus.
"On Wisconsin!"</p>
<p>It looks so nice there. Here in NH the forecast for the next 8 days is rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain and rain. Today's expected high-52!</p>
<p>I may have written this elsewhere on CC; if so I apologize for repeating myself but it does seem to fit on this thread.</p>
<p>On Friday, 5/20, I returned to Madison after a week long tour of the state with 40 other new faculty and staff. It had been cold and wet throughout most of the trip. When we got off the bus in Madison it was in the 70s. I turned to one of my colleagues and asked him: "Do you know what we call this kind of weather in Virginia?" He didn't know. I said: "March."</p>
<p>LOL.</p>
<p>Tsdad, a warning. Ice-fishing season is over. It's no longer safe to drive your car onto Lake Mendota.</p>
<p>The lake didn't melt until April.</p>
<p>I'm told that there are two seasons in Wisconsin: winter and road repair.</p>
<p>A great state for hubcap collectors, wheel alignment businesses. </p>
<p>(I really DO love the state of WI -- really!)</p>
<p>The pictures are beautiful. I haven't been back to Madison in more than 30 years and those picture make me wonder what has taken so long.</p>
<p>They take new staff on a weeklong tour of the entire state? That is amazing! What department are you in?</p>
<p>April was not that bad at all. Average high of 62 degrees. May got off a little slow but it has been crappy all over the northeast too.
Thanks for the pix too.</p>
<p>The purpose of the tour is to introduce new faculty and administrators to the State of Wisconsin. Not all new staff goes. It is part of the Wisconsin Idea concept, which is undefined but means something like: the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state. It is tied up with the concept of public service, which is one of the considerations in faculty promotion. </p>
<p>We went all over the state to farms, small towns, a National Seashore, an Indian reservation, a high school, a community medical facility that serves migrants, a manufacturing company that makes very high end ties ($125.00 for Nordstroms), and other colleges. We met with farmers, prison managers, teachers, college Presidents and Deans, cows (close-up and personal for some of my colleagues), professors, students, and politicians.</p>
<p>Check out this website at Northland College. It's about our visit.</p>
<p>I learned the following during the trip:</p>
<ol>
<li>There is a lot of North in Wisconsin.</li>
<li>Logging companies did some very bad things to the State.</li>
<li>Terminal moraines make for some interesting landscapes.</li>
<li>Assistant Professors of History teach about events that I lived through.</li>
</ol>
<p>NJres:</p>
<p>Click on my name. You'll find a listing of my current position at the University.</p>
<p>1 thru 4 sounds pretty much like Michigan. Well, we do share a border and a Great Lake with Wisconsin.</p>
<p>ts - Glad to hear you enjoyed your trip. I think it is one of the coolest things the university does for new faculty. And you are about to discover that the advantage to living in WI from Nov. to April is that then you get to live here from May to October, and most of the time it is wonderful. Enjoy!</p>
<p>Summer came to Northern California this weekend, highs in the '80s....Crayon blue sky peculiar to this neck of the woods.</p>
<p>Thunderstorms and rainbows in the northwest for May. Highs?? in the upper 50's-low 60's. They still say we are in a drought. No wonder scientists get less respect than they should.</p>
<p>This project came about because the participant was involved in the Wisconsin Idea Seminar in 2001. We visited Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College last week.</p>
<p>-----Original Message-----
From: UW-Madison news [mailto:<a href="mailto:releases@news.wisc.edu">releases@news.wisc.edu</a>]
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 2:01 PM
To: Susan Fischer
Subject: UW-Madison News Release--Student Project Helps Tribal College</p>
<p>FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
05/19/05</p>
<p>CONTACT: Sue Thering, (608) 263-6506, <a href="mailto:sathering@facstaff.wisc.edu">sathering@facstaff.wisc.edu</a> </p>
<p>PROJECT HELPS STUDENT HOUSING AT A TRIBAL COLLEGE GROW</p>
<p>MADISON- Plenty of University of Wisconsin-Madison seniors sequester themselves in libraries and labs preparing final projects for upper-level classes, but landscape architecture major Katie Selin recently found herself mapping land, reviewing aerial photographs, conducting workshops and meeting with tribal elders in northern Wisconsin. </p>
<p>As part of a capstone experience for her undergraduate degree, Selin created a plan for environmentally friendly student housing and community space at the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College.</p>
<p>"There's an overarching tension on the reservation between the need for housing and economic development and the need to preserve water quality," explains Sue Thering, a professor of landscape architecture in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and Selin's advisor. Of particular importance are the area's wild rice beds, which are embedded in Ojibwa culture, says Thering. </p>
<p>As the reservation and the college plan to add much-needed housing, instructional and community space, they must find a way to place roads and buildings without compromising environmental quality - and that's where Selin, Thering and others in the department saw an opportunity to be involved. Landscape architects design, plan and manage everything from small sites to regional corridors, with the goal of revitalizing and protecting environment and culture for future generations.</p>
<p>All CALS students, including landscape architect majors, are required to complete a capstone course where they apply classroom learning to real-world problems. For her project, Selin, a Madison native, worked with Lac Courte Oreilles elders and community members to design new housing for the college-with an emphasis on single student families and tribal elders.
She
also did some regional work mapping green infrastructure and identifying key environmental corridors.</p>
<p>While Selin had the design knowledge she needed to tackle a project of this size, she teamed up with Katy Bresette - a UW-Madison student from Red Cliff, Wis., and the daughter of Ojibwe activist Walt Bresette - to incorporate native culture into her work. "Katy is my cultural mentor," says Selin. "She helped me bring aspects of a very complex culture into my plans in a meaningful way."</p>
<p>"I was able to connect the proposed buildings with an ethno-botany trail on the site," Selin explains. "I also used cultural symbols in social spaces, in the hopes of fostering interaction. I designed a courtyard in the shape of a dream catcher, using rings of plants with colorful blooms to represent the traditional medicine wheel."</p>
<p>While there's no guarantee that Selin's proposal will be used, it gives the reservation and the college some ideas to consider. The project has been getting some recognition outside of Wisconsin: Selin, Bresette and Thering recently presented their work at the Association of Community Design conference in New York City.</p>
<p>"To me, the benefit of doing a capstone course like this is that this is the type of project that a design firm might never take on," says Selin.
"But
I'm learning to design in a different way because of this." </p>
<ul>
<li>Katie Weber, (608) 262-3636, <a href="mailto:klweber1@wisc.edu">klweber1@wisc.edu</a></li>
</ul>