A colleague (also working on EdFutures wiki) asked about some stuff on collaborative learning and dialogue a while ago. I didn’t have time to write a long review (although, see bottom of page for 2 things I’ve contributed to on this topic) but these are some key texts/things I’d google on that topic. Bob slavin Virtual Math Teams Thinking Together IWB project at Cambridge T-media project at Cambridge
Littleton, Karen, and Christine Howe. Educational Dialogues: Understanding and Promoting Productive Interaction. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2010.
Kershner, Ruth, Neil Mercer, Paul Warwick, and Judith Kleine Staarman. “Can the Interactive Whiteboard Support Young Children’s Collaborative Communication and Thinking in Classroom Science Activities?” International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 5, no. 4 (2010): 359–383.
Pifarré, Manoli, and Judith Kleine Staarman. “Wiki-supported Collaborative Learning in Primary Education: How a Dialogic Space Is Created for Thinking Together.” International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 6, no. 2 (April 15, 2011): 187–205.
Mercer, Neil, and Karen Littleton. Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: a Sociocultural Approach. Taylor & Francis, 2007.
Rojas-Drummond, Sylvia, Neil Mercer, and Ellen Dabrowski. “Collaboration, Scaffolding and the Promotion of Problem Solving Strategies in Mexican Pre-schoolers.” European Journal of Psychology of Education 16 (June 2001): 179–196.
Wegerif, Rupert, Karen Littleton, Lyn Dawes, Neil Mercer, and Denise Rowe. “Widening Access to Educational Opportunities Through Teaching Children How to Reason Together.” Westminster Studies in Education 27, no. 2 (2004): 143.
Edwards, Derek, and Neil Mercer. Common Knowledge: The Development of Understanding in the Classroom. London, UK: Routledge, 1987.
Vygotsky, L. S. The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky. Edited by R. W Rieber and A. S Carton. Vol. 1. New York: Plenum Press, 1987.
Wells, Gordon. Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
To plug two things I contributed to, the first of these is an accessible introduction to dialogue in the classroom, the second is a much longer (but teacher oriented) ‘book’ collection with openly licensed texts on a variety of topics including dialogue in the classroom (the team worked on this, I was the primary person collecting the texts, editing them together, organising them, adding link text, etc.).
Knight, Simon. “Promoting Dialogue in the Classroom.” In Developing Interactive Teaching and Learning Using the IWB, edited by Sara Hennessy, Paul Warwick, Neil Mercer, Lloyd Brown, Diane Rawlins, and Caroline Neale. Open University Press, 2013.
Knight, Simon, and ORBIT Team, eds. ORBIT Coursebook. 1st ed. Cambridge, UK: ORBIT, 2012. http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/ORBIT:Books/ORBIT.