Background
As CTO of the University of Texas, Dr. Larry Leibrock is responsible for the IT resources that keep over 10,000 faculty and students operating. As Associate Dean of the School of Business Administration, he also teaches classes centered on networking, computer security, and information forensics. VisualRoute is a standard part of the curriculum for both networking and security courses.
Teaching with VisualRoute
The University admits over 500 new MBA students each year, many without a technical background. Dr. Leibrock uses VisualRoute to introduce networking concepts to these students.
We use VisualRoute to actually show them how the internet works and how we support internet connectivity. Its graphical interface combines several essential networking tools into a single picture that is much easier to understand than the individual tools like tracert and whois.
Dr. Larry Leibrock, CTO, University of Texas
Due to its effectiveness as a teaching aid, the University now hosts VisualRoute Server on its intranet so students can access and learn for themselves.
Information security and the courtroom
The visual nature of the tool is particularly helpful for teaching information security at the law school. Today over 90 percent of the information an executive sees is electronic, and a large portion of court cases revolve around digital evidence.
Dr. Leibrock is often asked to act as a consultant or expert witness for court cases involving internet-related crimes, ranging from petty theft to capital offense espionage. He uses VisualRoute to research cases and to give court evidence.
VisualRoute has proved quite useful to explain internet concepts to a non-technical audience, like in court cases to a judge or jury. To most people a data packet does not have much meaning. A graphic and map of the actual path of an internet connection is easily understandable.
Dr. Larry Leibrock
In one case, Dr. Leibrock used VisualRoute to explain to a jury how email was used to solicit a young child. He has also used it to verify credit fraud, based on the IP address location that made a transaction.
The takeaway
This tool is a powerful exploration and explanation tool to explain to people how the internet works. The nice thing about VisualRoute is that it is very intuitive, and the results are immediately clear. A person can sit down with VisualRoute and learn how to apply the tool within minutes.
Dr. Larry Leibrock