The text “answers” service ChaCha invites user to “simply ask your question like you are talking to a smart friend and ChaCha’s advanced technology instantly routes it to the most knowledgeable person on that topic in our Guide community. Your answer is then returned to your phone as a text message within a few minutes.”

I tried a few questions to see how it works. Here are the results:

Q: What is a confidence interval?
A: A group of continuous or discrete adjacent values is used to estimate a statistical parameter (as a mean or variance)

Q: When was the French Revolution?
A: A major transformation of the society and political system of France, the French Revolution lasted from 1789 to 1799.

Q: How does photosynthesis work?
A: Photosynthesis is the process by which green plants convert carbon dioxide to sugar and oxygen using sunlight for energy.

Q: Who wrote the Book of Mormon? (Thought I’d try a difficult one.)
A: No one can say with certainty who wrote it, or which author wrote which portions. There were too many contributors.

The answers are surprisingly cogent. Where do they come from? According to the site, live “ChaCha Guides” are behind the answers:

ChaCha’s Guides are individuals who are part of a vibrant community dedicated to helping people by sharing their knowledge. To become a ChaCha Guide, you must pass a series of tests that verify that you are a good fit with our Guide community. You are then able to go through ChaCha’s Search University and simulation process to become certified as a live ChaCha Guide. This unique approach aims to ensure that only knowledgeable people who have an interest in sharing their knowledge with others are part of ChaCha’s Guide community. ChaCha’s technology is also learning from each answer that is provided by our guides so that we can deliver accurate answers as quickly as possible

It’s unclear to me if the Guides are volunteers or if they are paid. In any case, this service raises interesting questions about the nature of knowledge. When I first heard of ChaCha and did some investigation, I was primarily concerned that students might use such a service to cheat on exams, quizzes and even homework. And I remain concerned that a student might surreptitiously use a cell phone in his or her pocket to “look up” answers on a test.

But this got me thinking about the nature of knowledge and the importance of recall. If a student can (almost) instantaneously get answers to factual questions, how important is it for us to require them to memorize facts? ChaCha will certainly not be the last or most sophisticated tool that provides just-in-time answers to knowledge questions.  As educators and learning technologists, our challenge is to figure out how to make assessment more meaningful and authentic in a world in which rapidly accessing facts is a trivial matter. When anyone can access any bit of knowledge anywhere, anytime, the real premium will increasingly be knowing what to do with that knowledge. Memorization will increasingly give way to analysis, synthesis and the creation of knew knowledge.

Plus cha-cha change . . .