Karen Player

Creating Connections - Building Networks

An unlimited wealth of expertise, materials, experiences and information already exists amongst the staff, collections and research of government, not for profit and educational groups across Australia. These organisations are constantly looking for ways to share their knowledge and expertise as widely as possible. Video conferencing has offered enormous potential to create enriching learning experiences and has provided a gateway for many organisations to open up their resources and collections to students across the world.

Collaboration between many of these organisations has seen a real sharing of knowledge to help other groups get started. By working together and building networks we can do more with less. The NSW Video Conferencing working group is a professional network of educational content providers and has over 30 participating organisation. We learn from the experience of others to avoid the same pitfalls or develop new partnerships and generate new content ideas.

The strength of these networks is in the collaboration of content and ideas, reducing impact on resources and staff.

Karen Player's Biography
Karen Player is the Museum Outreach coordinator at the Australian Museum. Karen has a background in environmental science and education and is committed to outreach programs throughout New South Wales and beyond.
Karen has worked at the Australian Museum for the last 14 years in education and interpretive roles. She became involved in the Australian Museum's outreach programs as coordinator of Science communication and then moved across into Museum in a Box. Last year Museum in a Box delivered 550 boxes of Museum specimens and educational resources to over 250 schools across NSW reaching over 65000 students. For the last 3 years Karen has been coordinating Video Conferencing programs across the Australian Museum. This has provided a great opportunity to have school with the physical object in class link up with a Museum educator. Last year they presented video conferencing events to 7500 students from 200 schools across the state.
Karen is the chair of the NSW video conferencing working group, which is a professional network of educational content providers and has over 30 participating organisation.