After a busy and snowy start (122 inches season to date and more forecasted for tomorrow!) to 2008, I’m finally catching up on some reading and came across an article that got me thinking futures (in both Learning and summertime!). The Vanishing Point of Learning: How Can You Use It? in a recent Chief Learning Officer magazine explored the future in Learning using web-based second lives, simulation games and the wiki sphere to promote experiential learning – even if that experience is only virtual.

Bob Becker of learning design firm Becker Multimedia says the vanishing points of learning are “where people learn without being taught, practice without being licensed, collaborate without being led and discover without having to search.”

Becker suggests that the teacher-student relationship may soon be supplanted by people sitting at their computers, learning through virtually doing (as in Second Life or other simulation games) or sharing (through wikis and social networks). Rather than being told what to learn, people are now discovering knowledge on their own. He thinks corporations need to embrace these new modes of experience to help people learn. I agree, and am currently appointing a “learning futures leader” in my organization to look at how HP can leverage these new learning methods.

I’ll add my two cents here by saying this is especially important for Generation Y workers who have grown up with the Web as a core means for interacting with others and getting information about anything and everything. For example, when my friend’s teenage daughter got a new smart phone, she wouldn’t touch the printed instruction manual. Instead, she got online to go through the interactive demo to learn about the phone’s features. When this girl eventually enters the workforce, she’ll find it difficult to sit in a classroom and view a deck of PowerPoint slides to learn about topics important for her job. No, she’ll want to turn to the Web for an interactive learning experience where there are no boundaries to what can be learned.

But changing the way we design learning programs is no easy feat. Our first stab at putting learning on the Web was basically taking those old PowerPoint slides from the classroom and making them available as a webinar. We may be liberated from the classroom, but we’re still at the mercy of the content-constrained slide deck.

It’s going to take a sea change in instructional design to immerse students in virtual worlds where avatars and actions replace PowerPoint. Becker describes it as “encountering knowledge” and having experiences that allow you to discover for yourself. To bring about this change, we need to merge the sciences of instructional design and video game design to give students the sense of learning by discovery.

It’s been done before. Pilots and astronauts regularly learn how to fly and control their aircraft in simulators. Surgeons practice their skills on interactive models. Could we apply these same techniques to sophisticated information technology topics?

Have you had the opportunity to use virtual worlds, social networks or other Web-based “next generation” resources to learn? I’m interested in hearing about how you like to learn.