The recent crowning of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) as a “new” approach for making web experiences more interactive made me wonder whether Don Norman is having one of those classic “I told you so” moments. Macromedia can lay claim to “Rich Internet Applications,” but Bruce Tognazzini, Jakob Nielsen, and Don Norman (friends and partners at Nielsen Norman Group) long ago talked of “weblications.”

An outgrowth of Tog’s distinction between “generic” and “super” browsers, and Don’s work on information appliances (see especially “The Invisible Computer“), weblications sought to replace the web’s “browsing” based metaphor with one that was “service” based. As Tognazzini and Nielsen commented in a 2001 eWeek article:

Browsers kicked off the Web revolution, but it’s time to retire them to their rightful place in the Computer Museum and get more powerful tools to support the hours of work and play we are all going to spend on the Internet every day in the future.

In 1999, I was fortunate enough to work with Don on bringing the ideas behind a “weblication” to the online learning arena. Rather than build (yet another) web-based learning platform that let “users” better navigate course content, we focused our attention on the experience of learning. With this perspective as our starting point, we sought to design an environment that enabled a distributed community to interact with learning objects and with each in support of a shared set of learning goals. For us, the “browser” was simply an encapsulating frame to support collaborative goal directed activities and services. We didn’t know it at the time, but we forging new ground in web-based applications interface design.

Our “weblication” has continued to evolve, and today we are proud that our “platform” has much more in common with Don’s original weblication that with the “files and folders” view of learning platforms that remains commonplace in today’s eLearning industry. Yet I wonder with all the talk about AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, internet operating systems, and the Web 2.0, if Don Norman isn’t smiling one of his patented “I told you so” smirks.

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