Teaching visual communication in a business communication course: an online magazine by Bovee and Thill, authors of the leading textbooks in business communication and business writing, published by Pearson, featuring resources about visual communication, data visualization, graphic design, photography, and presentations. For more information about Bovee and Thill's texts and their coverage of visual communication, visit https://blog.businesscommunicationnetwork.com. For instructor examination copies, go to https://blog.businesscommunicationnetwork.com/texts/. To find your local sales representative, go to https://www.pearson.com/en-us/help-and-support/contact-us/find-a-rep. To contact the authors, use this form: https://businesscommunicationnetwork.com/contact-us/. To get a free Comprehensive Guide to Business Communication Instructional Resources, visit https://blog.businesscommunicationnetwork.com/resources/. Subscribe to a free weekly newsletter of new posts to all 11 of Bovee and Thill's Online Magazines: https://sco.lt/8kgeVV.
 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Scoop.it!
From
fstoppers
Deepfakes rose from 500k files in 2023 to 8 million by 2025. While C2PA offers cryptographic signing for cameras and video, metadata stripping on social platforms undermines verification at scale, leaving real and fake footage indistinguishable.
Bovee & Thill's Online Business Communication Magazines's insight:
Alex Cooke lays out arithmetic that should worry anyone who teaches visual communication. Deepfake files circulating globally went from roughly 500,000 in 2023 to more than 8 million in 2025. In March 2026 a political committee ran a minute-long ad of a Senate candidate speaking words he never said on camera, with "AI Generated" shrinking into the corner of the frame. The same month, synthetic clips of missile strikes on Tel Aviv went viral, and real footage from the same conflict was widely dismissed as fake.
The photography industry's answer is C2PA, the standard that lets a camera cryptographically sign an image and carry a tamper-evident record of every edit. Cooke's case is that the standard is real and still won't fix this. Most social platforms strip the metadata during upload, so a signed file loses its manifest the moment it reaches an audience. Signing also lives at the high end. Canon's entry-level bodies, Nikon's Z5 and Z30, and Sony's a6000 series don't support it, while most of the world's photographs come from phones. Nikon added signing to the Z6 III in August 2025, found a vulnerability, revoked the certificates, and hadn't restored the service as of early 2026.
Students are about to spend careers producing images for employers who will be held responsible for them. Walk them through what a Content Credential actually proves, which is what tool made a file and who signed it, and what it doesn't prove, which is whether the scene in front of the lens was real. That gap is where the interesting business communication questions live.
Scoop.it!
Imagine teaching a visual communication chapter that truly prepares students for today's AI-powered workplace. Chapter 9 of Business Communication Today, 16th Edition, by Bovee and Thill, delivers exactly that – and here's what makes it revolutionary.
Business Communication Today, 16th Edition, by Bovee and Thill, deliver exactly what students need to succeed in our AI-enhanced world. That's the promise of Chapter 9.
Scoop.it!
|
Scoop.it!
In a media landscape overrun with slick data visualizations, students must develop the skills to scrutinize what’s presented to them as fact—or risk being led astray.
Bovee & Thill's Online Business Communication Magazines's insight:
Alexander Gardner moved a dead soldier's body and added a rifle that wasn't the soldier's own before he made "Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter" in 1863. Paige Tutt and Youki Terada open with that photograph because it makes the point faster than a lecture does. Visuals have been staged and reframed for as long as there have been visuals. Santiago Lyon of the Content Authenticity Initiative puts it plainly in the piece. Pictures can lie, and they do lie.
Then they put six charts in front of you. A Chevy reliability graph starts its y-axis at 95 percent, so a three-point gap reads like a landslide. A Reuters chart of Florida gun deaths runs its vertical axis upside down, which turns a rise into what looks like a decline; the designer was after the look of dripping blood rather than deception, which is a lesson in itself about how a visual choice carries meaning its maker never intended. A 2022 White House chart slips an odd value of 5.5 into its intervals and the final bar swells. The article cites a 2026 study in which strong students were fooled by design choices this subtle.
Alberto Cairo, who holds the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami and wrote How Charts Lie, explains why the tricks land. We associate numbers and charts with science and reason, so we drop our guard. Sarah Leo, a visual data journalist at The Economist whose team turns out roughly 40 charts a week, names the discipline that keeps them honest. The chart has to be fair, and you can't exaggerate or cherry-pick. Hand students a chart, ask them to find the manipulation before they read the caption, then ask them to rebuild the same data honestly. Students who have reconstructed a misleading chart with their own hands stop trusting charts automatically, which is the habit you want them carrying into a job where someone will eventually hand them a graph designed to win an argument.
Scoop.it!
And Why Most Business Communication Textbooks Aren't Solving It
Bovee & Thill's Online Business Communication Magazines's insight:
Visual communication has become a core career skill, yet many business graduates struggle because instruction often treats visualization as secondary rather than foundational.
While Gen Z students bring strong platform-based visual fluency, they lack the professional judgment needed for ethical, strategic business visualization—gaps that AI tools now amplify rather than solve.
The article argues that effective business communication curricula must integrate visual literacy and AI instruction throughout, not as add-ons, and must help students bridge consumer design habits to workplace decision-making. It positions Business Communication Today as distinctive for combining deep visual communication coverage with AI integration and robust instructor support that makes real-world teaching and learning outcomes achievable.
Scoop.it!
|
