FORCING DISRUPTION IN B-LEARNING WORKGROUPS Rosário Cação CISUC - Centre for Informatics and Systems - University of Coimbra (PORTUGAL) mrac@dei.uc.pt Abstract Sometimes, it may be desirable to promote the disruption of established workgroups in order to promote the students’ ability to work with different persons, working conditions, and leadership styles. We describe the impact of different techniques to promote the disruption of workgroups in b-learning contexts. The results show that the groups tend to keep unchanged, even if they are not working properly and that a non-sense game and a technique of creation of groups based on common interests can provoke healthy disruptions in the existing groups, promote the creation of new groups without installing conflicts, and increase the students’ motivation. The results of our study are useful for teachers and trainers who promote workgroups in their courses and are interested in improving their students’ motivation with their workgroups and in helping the students work with different groups and develop behavioral skills. Keywords: b-learning, disruption, group development, groups, innovation. 1 INTRODUCTION Teamwork is essential in every aspects of life: in private life, sports, business, and learning. Working as a team improves the overall performance [1] and has several advantages [2]. Yet, it is not simple to create a winning team nor it is a pain free process and sometimes teamwork fails. Even though not all groups can be considered a team [3], we need to understand how they became a group and how the group has evolved, and there are several models that explain group dynamics [4-7]. Our paper departures from the premise that sometimes, for several reasons, it may be helpful to promote a smooth disruption of existing groups and the creation of new groups. Teachers and trainers may be interested in forcing the students to change groups, in order to develop and deploy a set of competences that the labor market values, such as the ability to work with strangers or individuals with whom they do not sympathize, as well as the ability to change groups often. Our empirical study aimed at understanding the impact of a pedagogical strategy to provoke the disruption of workgroups and the re-creation of new ones. With that purpose in mind, we have draw five research questions, which we discuss later.The strategy of disruption is our pedagogical artifact as defended in design-based research [8-10]. We have used three techniques to create groups: the laisser-faire approach, where participants are asked to form groups freely, a non-sense game of unwrapping lollypops, which implicitly requires collaboration and promotes the emergence of groups, and an adaptation of Open Space Technology [11, 12], which promotes the creation of groups based on common interests. In the next section, we discuss why provoking a disruption in workgroups can be useful and why it should be considered by teachers and trainers. We then present the major models of group development and the different approaches that have been used to explain the evolution of groups. In the second part of the paper we present the method that we have used in our study and discuss the major findings. We conclude with some final considerations. 2 INTRODUCTION The objective of a group is to take advantage of different abilities, backgrounds, and interests [13]. Yet, building a group takes time and effort: it requires interaction, motivation towards a shared goal, adaptation, and balance of individual needs and styles [14, 15]. Some authors claim that groups are permanently shifting their focus, oscillating between instrumental task-related issues and social- emotional issues [16-18], while others [19, 20] assume that the groups deal with the tasks and the relational tracks simultaneously. For Gersick [21, 22], long periods of equilibrium are interrupted by brief periods of radical change and group reorientation. Other authors defend that groups develop by passing through a successive series of change, moving from an immature state to a mature state and unfolding a prefigured sequence of stages that form a life cycle. This is the case of Lewin's [23], Proceedings of ICERI2012 Conference 19th-21st November 2012, Madrid, Spain ISBN: 978-84-616-0763-1 2482