Welcome to my blog for 2012 and a Happy New Year to all. I’m kicking off the year with a guest post from Macquarie University’s Professor DAVID CHRISTIAN , a world-leading expert on Big History who on Sunday will head off to Davos to take part in the World Economic Forum. David writes:

I didn’t even know that academics got invited to this annual event, which is mainly designed for CEOs of major international corporations (think Bill Gates, or Google’s Eric Schmidt or Vineet Nayar, the CEO of India’s equivalent of Microsoft, HCL Technologies), and cabinet level politicians (Kev will be there, along with a handful of PMs and Treasurers and their mates) to chew the cud on major global issues.

This year it looks as if the real issue will be the Euro, though the official theme of the conference is “The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models”.  According to the Executive Summary: “… the purpose of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2012 is to ensure that leaders exercise their responsibilities – jointly, boldly and strategically – to improve the state of the world for future generations.”

It’s supposed to be about how leadership is needed to “create a more sustainable world”.  Very ambitious, but it’s good to know that such ambitious ideas are being discussed seriously.

So why would they need academics?  My first assumption was that our role would be that of Shakespearean clowns, providing entertainment spiced with a few deliciously uncomfortable banalities such as: “is planning for endless growth really such a smart idea?” But it turns out that the mega CEOs are all looking for “new ideas”, and many think, God bless them, that the universities can provide the really transformative ideas they are looking for.

I think I’ve been invited because I’ve been arguing for the importance of educating an entire generation in Big History, by teaching the history of the entire universe, from cosmology to biology to human history. And Bill Gates likes Big History, which helps a lot!  (For more on the big history project he is supporting see here)

Learning the story of Big History is like learning a modern, scientifically based, origin story.  (I did an 18 minute version of my course at the 2011 TED Talks in Long Beach.)  It gives you an overview of knowledge in general so you don’t succumb to the sense of despair felt by many students who can easily get overwhelmed by the tsunami of information they face in universities.

Big History can provide an overview, a sort of view from the top of the mountain. It can teach students skills that will be more and more important in today’s globally interconnected world: how to move easily across time scales ranging from 100 years to four billion years; how to think of the world globally; how to move fluently from astronomy to mathematics to geology to climatology to economics to anthropology to politics.

To think about the problems faced by humanity today these integrative skills, which are all too often neglected in higher education, will become more and more important.

Just think of trying to understand a problem like global warming. To really get it you need to feel comfortable thinking on time scales from a few months to several billion years; you must be able to understand a bit of chemistry, some physics, some climatology, but also some history, economics and politics.  And you will need to be able to think globally. For students of Big History, such thinking will seem familiar and natural.

And Macquarie has been teaching big history for more than 20 years now; the course is called MHIS 115 and it is a foundation course for modern history. So at Davos I’ll be waving the flag, handing out Macquarie University name cards as fast as I can, and advertising the newly established Macquarie University Big History Institute.

Luckily, I don’t have to give a stand up lecture. Instead, I’m on a number of panels. My first is on historic complexity. The panellists include James Gleick, who written best-sellers on chaos and on information. So how did human societies get to be so impossibly complex? How has complexity built up over the course of human history?  And why are humans the first species in four billion years to have built societies of such mind-boggling complexity?

Questions like these are the life blood of Big History, so I think I have some answers and I’ll be peddling them at Davos. We humans are the first species in the history of our Earth that can exchange information so efficiently that information starts to build up in the collective memory.

This mechanism is “Collective Learning”. It explains why we alone have a history of long term change, and it helps to explain why today we have become a planet-changing species. Can it also help us rein in the more dangerous sides of our astonishing technological precocity?

A second panel asks what lessons the 21st century can learn from the 20th century. Other panellists will include the economist Brian Arthur from the Santa Fe Institute, and the political theorist, Daniel Bell. As Steven Pinker has argued, some of the lessons are remarkably optimistic. Levels of warfare and inter-personal violence seem to be plummeting, as life expectancies are rising throughout the world.

There exists today a vast global middle class that enjoys levels of health and wealth that were limited to tiny elite groups for most of human history. But of course the power of our weaponry has grown by many orders of magnitude and we now wield technologies that could suck up most available resources of energy, food and raw materials in just a few years. But then our technological creativity seems to have accelerated alongside our ecological power.

And that suggests that our astonishing capacity for collective learning will surely provide us with the knowledge and skills needed to build a more sustainable planet, if only we can meet the difficult and complex challenge of learning to collaborate on a global scale, across regions, religions and cultural differences. I’m going to be arguing that integrative education, such as the Big History syllabi Macquarie is helping to develop for high schools, will lay the intellectual foundations for the sense of global citizenship that will be critical to solving such problems.

Finally, there’s a solo panel called, somewhat grandly: “An Insight, An Idea with David Christian”. My idea? Big History is a seriously good thing and everyone ought to be doing it! Hope I can say that in a way that is engaging and perhaps even persuasive!

Must remember not to go to too many of those cocktail parties to make sure that I bring to the panels as many brain cells as I can muster …

Steven Schwartz writes: I’ll post an update from David next week.