Solving Meno’ S Paradox: Task Semantics and Narratives in Multimediated Educational Environments

This explorative paper discusses experiences from a multidisciplinary research project developing educational multimedia environments for project work in schools. The thematic point of departure is Meno’s paradox (from Plato’s dialogue Mend) which stands: how can you seek and learn something you know nothing of? And that is the paradox that meets the student who comes unassisted to an open-ended, multimediated educational environment. The paper focuses on the challenges for design and pedagogy in designingmultimediated technologicalaffordances for constructivist pedagogical settings in schools. The idea of pedagogical software narratives is discussed and related to experiences from field trialstesting out software developed in the project. It is argued that integrated pedagogical narratives is not the only possible pedagogical solution to Meno’s paradox.