COLLABORATIVE WORK: A CASE STUDY OF A PROJECT BUILT BY TWO VIRTUAL GROUPS

Technological development and the speed of communications generate greater interdependence between social groups and businesses. The globalization of markets produces savings that are not limited to the physical boundaries, and relationships between organizations today have more virtual components, which increase the difficulty of identifying their limits and influences. Today the society produces new scientific, technological and industrial groups that lead to intelligent innovation and continuous change. It is an established fact in literature that a team can only accommodate grows in the number of people up to a small number threshold, typically somewhere in the interval of ten to twenty. Past the threshold, the group odd peoples no longer functions as a team, mainly due to natural limitations in the human capabilities of perception, cognition and communication. Thus, this article compares the experiences of collaborative works between two virtual teams, where scenarios were available for the two groups could interact in the development of a project, through the use of cooperative learning tools supported by computing, although the two groups were separated by distance, a group in CEFET/RJ (Brazil), designed group A, and another at the University of Minho (Portugal), designed group B. From this experience, both groups used synchronous groupware tools such as MSN, e-mail and Skype. Each group consisted of 8 students, with group A consists of MSc students and group B for graduate students.