I don’t know who did it but there’s a great bad powerpoint version of the Gettysburg Address. It summarizes the points in an effective, and humorous way.
The students would create the notes the speech makers would need, set the agenda etc. Everything a really bad business powerpoint user would need. This is a great way to really explore a famous speech or historical document. You’d have to really examine the document/speech, the speaker etc. The key would be NOT to have them present for real but demo the presentation to the class explaining why they chose certain aspects of the presentation etc.
It’d be a lot of fun and require lots of deep processing to make it funny. I’d love to see a bad powerpoint version of Macbeth’s soliloquy or The Constitution etc.
It’s a great satire that was put together by a computer scientist at Berkeley who was tired of all the bad PowerPoints he had to sit through at meetings.
A good instructional companion piece to Gettysburg is Seth Godin’s short ebook Really Bad Powerpoint. It’s sometimes hard to find the free pdf version on the web but Seth has the text in a post on his blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/really_bad_powe.html Lots of really good advice in a very small space.