Seems to invent new terminology. A more traditional term for "on-demand" learning is "just in time" - a kind of epistemology."preliminary learning" aligns with the "just in case" epistemology of factory-style education.
"Just in time" is a great expression. It resonates with me because there is an existing body of knowledge around doing things just in time to reduce waste, and I think that's a lot of the motivation for learning things just in time:
1. You don't invest in learning something you won't use, and;
2. Learning something you will eventually use, but not in the near future, has an opportunity cost: What could you be doing with that time and attention that will produce value now?
I will make a separate comment describing what I think the drawbacks are, but I wanted to focus on my support for your preferred nomenclature.
True, but having had a number of my own musings make the front page of HN, the author must embrace the fact that just because they write about Y , doesn't mean the audience won't pull on a thread and decide the important thing to discuss is actually X.
Agreed, but the terminology doesn’t seems to be the point. It makes some decent arguments about “on-demand” learning not being great for learning theoretical things.
Implicitly, on-demand is also rapid. I can look up how to use a library in minutes and hours. Most people don't have jobs where they can allocate weeks or months to learning theory that they didn't need before. But such situations do exist: employers send staff on courses, and people sign up for part time degrees.
As I see it learning “on-demand” is good enough for most programming tasks. But I agree with the blog post tat the situations you mentioned where a person can actually learn new theory and perhaps push the boundaries are increasingly rarer.
