E-learning entails a different cognitive performativity from class or textual teaching and learning. It is critiqued through three case studies from lecturers working digitally in different ways. The authors' various challenges in shifting from the classroom to the "digitas" illuminate the risk of interpassivity into which "users" are easily tempted. There are a few caveats about education's headlong rush into e-learning. The paper details experiences of translating pedagogical philosophies and practical teaching methods from classroom to screen. Interrogating their teaching philosophies during this process led the authors to align e-learning with mediaeval mnemotechnics, spatially organised systems for structuring knowledge so that the learner develops holistically. In e-learning and mnemonics, spatiality and visual images are used as thinking devices. Placing e-learning on a vector with precepts from the past enables education's core values to hold steady through the (sometimes discomforting) shift in cognitive processing and identity that "e-tivity" demands.