In this paper we analyse learner participation as a contextual dimension of adapting graphical indicators for engaging and motivating learners in participating and contributing to an open community of practice. The purpose of the research underlying this paper is to identify variables and conditions for selecting and adapting visualisations of “interaction footprints" (Wexelblat & Maes, 1999) in order to facilitate context sensitive learner support in unstructured learning environments. An unstructured learning environment is best described as an environment in which learners interact at different expertise and activity levels where participants have changing or implicit roles, and interact without guidance of an expert or a pre-defined curricular structure.

Contextualised and ubiquitous learning are relatively new research areas that combine the latest developments in ubiquitous and context aware computing with educational approaches in order to provide structure to more situated and context aware learning. The majority of activities in contextualised and ubiquitous learning focus on mobile scenarios, in order to identify the relation between educational paradigms and new classes of mobile applications and devices. However, the meaning of context aware learner support is not limited to mobile learning scenarios by default. The educational paradigms of situated learning and communities of practice highlight these needs for informal learning and for workplace learning. In this paper we analyse learner participation as a contextual dimension of adapting graphical indicators for engaging and motivating learners in participating and contributing to an open community of practice. For this purpose we analyse six interviews with selected participants of that community. We compared the reactions of the learners who were provided different indicators during their interactions with an online system. The results of these interviews illustrate the impact of small variations in the aggregation and visualisation of interaction footprints on the engagement of learners at different contribution levels.